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THE PSYCHOLOGY 
OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 



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THE PSYCHOLOGY 
OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 



BY 



JAMES BISSETT PRATT, Ph.D. 

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY 
IN WILLIAMS COLLEGE 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 

1907 

All rights reserved 



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TO 

MY MOTHER 

FROM WHOSE LESSONS AND WHOSE LIFE 

I HAVE DRAWN ALL THE REAL RELIGION 

THAT I KNOW OR NEED 



PREFACE 

Although the psychology of religion is still 
exceedingly young, much valuable work has already 
been done on several aspects of the religious con- 
sciousness, such as conversion, mysticism, certain 
abnormal phenomena, etc. ; but the important 
question of religious belief, from the psychological 
point of view, has received but scant attention. 
To help break ground in this rich but rather 
neglected field is the aim of the present work. It 
does not concern itself with the nature or the defi- 4 y 
nition of religion, — a question that has resulted in 
so much smoke and so little light, — but is limited 
to the much more modest and concrete problem of / 
the nature of belief in a God or gods and the basis 
or bases on which this belief really rests. 

In order to attain a comprehensive view of this 
subject, I have not confined myself to psychology, 
but have made what use I could of the results of 
anthropology and the history of religion. How 
far I have succeeded in combining these rather 
diverse fields, so that they might lend each other 
mutual assistance in throwing light on our ques- 
tion, must be left to the reader to determine. 

My aim has been to write for both the technical 
and the general reader ; in fact, respecting many 



Vlll PREFACE 

things, my eye has been on the interests of the lat- 
ter even more than on those of the former. In spite 
of this, it may be that the discussions in the early 
part of the book will seem to some unnecessarily 
technical. But at any rate I can assure the reader 
that if he can worry through Chapter I, he need 
have nothing to fear from the remaining chapters ; 
they may prove uninteresting and unprofitable, 
but at least they will be clear. 

It is impossible in this place to make suitable 
acknowledgment to all those who, in one way or 
another, have aided me in the preparation of this 
book. I must not, however, neglect at least to 
mention those who so kindly helped me in the 
distribution of my questionnaire — especially my 
mother, without whose assistance the number of 
my responses, far too small as it is, would have 
been reduced by a substantial percentage. My 
thanks are also due to the editors of the Psycho- 
logical Review and of the American Journal of 
Religious Psychology and Education for their 
courtesy in permitting me to make use (in Chap- 
ters I and VIII) of material which I published in 
their journals during the past year. To Professor 
G. F. Moore of Harvard I am deeply indebted 
for advice on the historical part of my work. I 
am also glad of this opportunity to make mention 
of Professor John E. Russell of Williams College, 
the Rev. R. Lew Williams of Elmira, and Mr. 
Percival Henry Truman of Chicago, all of whom 
read my manuscript and aided me with their wise 



PREFACE IX 

suggestions. To the kindly criticisms of Mr. Tru- 
man, especially, this book owes a great deal. 

But most of all am I indebted to the assistance 
and inspiration of Professor William James. How 
deeply his " Varieties of Religious Experience " 
has influenced my thought will be patent to every 
reader of this book. His " Principles of Psychol- 
ogy " and his "Will to Believe" have been only 
less influential, while to his lectures and to personal 
contact with him I owe even more than to his 
writings. I esteem it a privilege that I have an 
opportunity thus publicly to acknowledge a debt 
I can never repay. 

WlLLIAMSTOWN, MASSACHUSETTS, 

December 19, 1906. 



CONTENTS 

PART I 

Psychological 
CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

The Elements of Psychic Life .... 3 

CHAPTER II 
The Nature of Belief ...... 29 

PART II 
Historical 

CHAPTER III 
Religious Belief among Primitive Peoples . 47 

CHAPTER IV 
Religious Belief in India 74 

CHAPTER V 
Religious Belief in Israel 109 

CHAPTER VI 

Three Phases of Christian Belief . . .148 

xi 



Xll CONTENTS 

PART III 

The Present Status of Religious Belief 



CHAPTER VII 

PAGE 

The Development of Religious Belief during 

Childhood and Youth 199 



CHAPTER VIII 
Types of Belief in Mature Life . . . .231 

CHAPTER IX 
The Value of God 262 

CHAPTER X 
Conclusion 280 

APPENDIX A. — Questionnaire . . . .307 
APPENDIX B. — Bibliography . . . .310 
INDEX 321 



PART I 
PSYCHOLOGICAL 



THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 
RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

CHAPTER I 

THE ELEMENTS OF PSYCHIC LIFE * 

If an inhabitant of Mars (which let us suppose 
for the moment is an atheistic planet) should sud- 
denly be transported to our earth and should make 
a tour of inspection, we may imagine his feelings of 
surprise and wonder at all sorts of institutions and 
ideas that would for the first time come under his 
ken. If, for instance, he should land from his aerial 
car in America and should start his studies by inves- 
tigating our country and our institutions, he would 
be struck, we may well suppose, with our mountains 
and rivers, with the rush of our great cities and our 
business enterprise, and he would study with sur- 
prised interest the wonders of steam and electricity, 
the feats of engineering, the marvels of applied 
mechanics, and the beauties and freaks of our art. 
But the one thing, I apprehend, which would fill him 
with amazement beyond all others would be the 
striking discovery that the inhabitants of this great 

1 A portion of this chapter appeared, in somewhat different 
form, in the Psychological Review for January, 1906. 

3 



4 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

land, almost to a man, believed, and with a good deal 
of firmness, in a being whom no man had ever seen 
or hoped to see, whose nature they could but dimly 
conceive, yet whom they must worship and love, — 
and whom (for want, apparently, of a better name) 
they called " God." 

If our imaginary Martian should travel to other 
lands, his amazement at this fact would only increase. 
On leaving America and Europe and pushing his 
way into Asia and Africa, he would gradually say 
farewell to steam and electricity; the sail-boat and 
canoe would take the place of the steamship, the 
horse and the camel would be substituted for the 
express train, and the Bushman's hut and the hollow 
tree would replace the sky-scraper and the palace; 
languages and dress, habits of mind and grades of 
intelligence and of morality, would change with the 
latitude and longitude ; but go where he might, in 
Polynesia no less than in Rome and in New York, he 
would everywhere be confronted with the same firm 
belief in some kind of superhuman being whom 
one must worship, supplicate, and adore. 

If now to discover the origin of this strange phe- 
nomenon he should betake himself to the study of 
history, he would learn with increasing astonishment, 
that history knew no more of the origin of this belief 
than he ; because, as far back as she can go, not a 
race nor tribe is to be met with, no matter how primi- 
tive its ideas and its customs, that has been without 
this belief. Most other human ideas and institu- 



THE ELEMENTS OF PSYCHIC LIFE 5 

tions, he would find, change with the century as 
well as with the latitude; but this belief in some- 
thing which man insists upon calling divine, though 
constantly altering its form and its expression, would 
seem to him, after he had finished his investigations, 
to be one of the few things as natural to man as 
breathing. 

The surprise of our hypothetical visitor is some- 
thing that we well may share. This universality 
in belief, this consensus gentium,, has seemed to many 
a reflective mind full of significance, and at the least 
is surely one of the most striking of the many odd 
facts that characterize this strange creature we call 
man. It is not my purpose, however, to discuss the 
objective significance of this fact, but to treat it 
purely from the psychological point of view. Why 
do men believe as they do ? On what does this belief 
actually rest ? From what does it draw its strength, 
and in what region of our psychic life is it mainly 
intrenched? In short, what are the psychological 
bases of religious belief? These are questions of 
the utmost importance, not only to the psychologist 
and the sociologist, but still more to the minister, 
the teacher, and the lover of men. And these are 
the questions which I wish to discuss in the follow- 
ing pages. 

For a thorough and satisfactory investigation of 
this subject we must have recourse to several differ- 
ent fields of inquiry. And first of all, to lay a founda- 
tion for the rest of our work, we must now take up 



THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

what I fear may prove a rather dry study of certain 
psychological facts. But let the reader be of good 
cheer and undiscouraged by this first necessary labor 
of breaking ground ; for in due season, I trust, we 
shall reap if we faint not. 



*C Recent discussions on the psychology of religion 
have centered attention on the relative importance 
and value of the " center" as against the " fringe" 
of consciousness ; of the closely reasoned product of 
articulate thought, on the one hand, and of the un- 
reasoned intuitional or emotional product of feeling 
on the other. The antithesis thus suggested is 
important and points the way, I believe, to a distinc- 
tion among the elements of psychic life more funda- 
mental and more fruitful than the traditional tri- 
partite division. 1 As the whole of this book will 
be largely concerned with the relative value in 

1 The traditional classification of consciousness into knowing, 
feeling, and willing is useful for a rough and practical view of the 
mind, but is unsatisfactory as an exact analysis. If we are seeking 
for the primary constituents of psychic life which are not further 
analyzable, if, so to speak, we take a cross section of consciousness 
and look at it endwise to note the various threads that constitute it, 
we shall not find will an element in the same sense in which feeling 
and knowing are elements. In fact, strictly speaking, will is not 
an element at all. If we take up a writer like Sully, who main- 
tains the elementary character of conation, and read his descrip- 
tion of it, the effect is bewildering. One hundred and fifty pages 
are given to the subject, and a great mass of psychic material is 
included under the term "conation"; but all this material turns 



THE ELEMENTS OF PSYCHIC LIFE 7 

religious belief of these two phases of consciousness, 
— the clear presentation of thought and the non- 
rational feeling or instinctive intuition, — it will be 
well for us at the outset to examine them in some de- 
tail, and before dealing with their influence on religion 
to see what relation each bears to life in general. 

If, then, we submit consciousness to a minute, 
analytic survey, we shall find, I repeat, two chief 
divisions, two principal kinds of psychic stuff. One 
of these consists of the definite, describable, com- 
municable elements of consciousness; the rational, 
the cognitive, the representative; the material, 

out to be ultimately either sensation or ideation or feeling; and 
the will itself, or conation, as distinct from the other psychical ele- 
ments, always eludes our grasp. The truth is, if you look for will 
as an element, you can never find it ; for it is a compound — the 
most inclusive of all psychic compounds. It is a matter of the 
succession of states of consciousness and is not to be found in any 
cross section of the stream. You can never single it out from its 
psychic content, as you can feeling, and say, This is pure will. 
You can never put your finger on it. It is no more a given matter 
which you find, than association is. Will and association occur; 
they are not given. They are processes, not elements. To in- 
clude will in an enumeration of the elements of psychic life is like 
saying the competitors in a race were A, B, C, and swiftness ; or 
like speaking of the circulatory system as containing venous blood, 
arterial blood, and circulation. 

In saying this I do not wish to be interpreted as denying the 
primacy of volitional, conative life. The whole stream of con- 
sciousness may very well be considered a matter of conation; my 
point is that no one element of it alone can be called conation, to the 
exclusion of the rest. Activity is a very real thing, but psychological 
analysis never finds it except in terms of feeling, sensation, etc., all 
of which it combines with itself. 



8 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

which may be made public property by means of 
scientific and exact description. The other class is 
made up of the indefinite, the indescribable, the pe- 
culiarly private mass of subjective experiences which, 
by their very nature, are not susceptible of communi- 
cation, and which to be exactly described must be 
made over so as to lose their characteristic quality 
and cease to be what they were ; the conscious mate- 
rial that refers to nothing but itself, has no outer 
reference, does not pretend to be representative, 
stands for itself alone. 1 

As the student of Greek psychology will see, the 
dual classification here suggested is in line with 
Aristotle's division of mind into thought and desire. 
And our first great class, the rational or cognitive, 
naturally falls apart, as did his, into two subdivisions ; 
namely, jdealinn and sensory ^ypp nence. For al- 
though both of these belong to the^jescribabl^, com- 
municable part of our psychic life, the differences 
between them are great and must not be overlooked. 
Not only do they differ in their physiological causes ; 

1 Professor Baldwin makes almost the same distinction, for, 
though retaining the old tripartite division, he includes under feel- 
ing all that I have placed in my second or non-cognitive division. 
This, however, Baldwin does not consider as including only a 
part of the totality of psychical material (as I have above), 
but rather as merely one aspect of experience as a whole. The 
same mental object may be from one point of view affective, from 
another cognitive. He defines feeling in this broad sense as "the 
subjective side of any modification whatever of consciousness, or 
. . . the simple awareness of consciousness" ("Feeling and 
Will," p. 85). 



THE ELEMENTS OF PSYCHIC LIFE g 

they differ also in character. As compared with 
sense perceptions, mental images are uniformly pale, 
incomplete, poor in content, and fleeting. Nor does 
this fully state the difference. Images and percep- 
tions may vary, according to Professor Munsterberg, 
in three ways ; namely, in quality, intensity, and 
vividness. Will any or all of these variations com- 
bined account for the difference between a perception 
and its corresponding image? Compare the sensa- 
tion of a gray color to which we pay little attention, 
and the memory image of it to which we pay much 
attention. The difference is great; but it is not a 
difference of vividness, nor of intensity, nor of quality. 
It is due rather to the presence of something new in 
kind and is sufficiently great to warrant us in consid- 
ering sensation and idea, as suggested above, two 
perfectly distinct divisions within the larger class of 
the cognitive and communicable. 

The second division in the dual classification which 
we have adopted is less easily analyzed into subdivi- 
sions because more amorphous in its nature. We 
may, however, distinguish within it two kinds of 
psychic material sufficiently distinct to be kept apart, 
at least ideally; namely, jjeeiing^and what is known 
as the phenomena of the background. What I mean 
by these latter will be sufficiently clear to all students 
of psychology. 1 Common examples are double im- 
ages, visual impressions outside the center of vision, 

1 Cf. especially James, " Principles of Psychology," Vol. I, 
pp. 240-264. 



IO THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

the ticking of the clock to which we pay no attention, 
the whirring of the mill wheels in the miller's ears, 
or the roar of the ocean in those of the sailor. These 
things are in the background or fringe region. They 
are not noetic, objective, defined, and communicable, 
but subjective and private. As soon as we fix atten- 
tion upon them and thus take them out of the fringe 
region, they become noetic and communicable, but 
not till then. That we are really conscious of them 
before fixing our attention upon them — i.e. that 
they belong to the fringe and are not purely physio- 
logical and unconscious — is shown by the fact that 
we notice their cessation. If the clock which we did 
not "hear" suddenly stops, we feel that something 
has happened ; our total consciousness undergoes a 
change. Thus, while still in the fringe region and 
while as yet unnoticed and unknown, they have an 
effect upon the general tone of our consciousness, they 
color our life — and this not in an intellectual, but 
in an affective way. In this conscious background 
belong also the fringes which weave themselves about 
our clearest ideas; " feelings of tendency ".; the 
vague meanings which are yet no meanings, and 
which are neither ideas nor feelings; the facts of 
subconscious mental activity which cannot be denied, 
— in short, all that heterogeneous mass of rich, sub- 
jective, psychic material which surrounds the clearly 
illuminated focal point of consciousness and owing 
to its indefinite nature is not susceptible of scientific 
description. For consciousness cannot be adequately 



THE ELEMENTS OF PSYCHIC LIFE II 

represented by a geometrical point without exten- 
sion and with no varying grades of intensity, but 
should rather be symbolized by the field of vision, 1 
which has a focal point of clearest sight and a mar- 
ginal field extending out from the center indefinitely, 
with no clearly marked outer limit. 2 
If the classification which we have adopted is cor- 

1 Cf . Wundt, " Grundziige der Physiolog. Psychologie," Vol. 
II, p. 267 f. ; also Baldwin, "Senses and Intellect," pp. 63-65, and 
diagram (p. 68, note) of the field of consciousness in four concentric 
circles illustrating respectively apperception, attention, diffused 
consciousness, and the subconscious, the last being encircled by the 
unconscious (physiological). 

2 This is, of course, the common conception of consciousness. 
It is most directly combated in an excellent article by Dr. Irving 
King ("The Problem of the Subconscious," Psychological Review, 
January, 1906), "As far as a conscious process is concerned," 
writes Dr. King, "it may be said to be best symbolized, for pur- 
poses of description, as a point. It does not have extent, neither 
does it consist of parts, so that, at any moment, it cannot be said 
to contain elements of varying intensity. Although it may be true 
that objects do in varying degrees affect consciousness, or that 
many objects may be in consciousness at a given instant, it does 
not follow that it itself is composed of states of varying intensities, 
or that it could be represented, for instance, by a circle of gray, 
the center of whjch is white and the circumference black, with 
all intermediate shades of gray between these extremes. That is 
to say, consciousness does not shade off gradually into unconscious- 
ness. It either exists or it does not exist ; it may be more intense 
at one moment than at another. It may even at some moments 
be said to be at a minimum. But at any one moment it is, for 
purposes of description, a unitary existence without parts which 
might be thought as clustering about a center with different de- 
grees of intensity and adhesion. That is to say, the 'fringe' 
conception does not describe a characteristic of the edge of con- 
sciousness, in the sense that any conscious state possesses a psychic 



12 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

rect, this fringe region, it will be observed, is much 
more closely related to feeling than to either ideation 
or sensation. Between the most clearly differen- 
tiated feeling and the vague background there is no 
cleft but a steady decrease of differentiation in which 
no line can be drawn. All pleasure -pains, all feel- 
ings of tension and relief, of excitement and depres- 
sion (if we adopt Wundt's classification), have the 
same lack of clear-cut outlines, the same irrational 
and private nature, the same subjective and non- 
representative quality, that characterize the back- 
ground. "You can know what I know and you can 
will what I will, but you cannot by any possibility 
feel what I feel; this is subjectivity, this peculiar 
and unapproachable isolation of one consciousness 
from another." x Hoffding defines feeling as "that 

halo; it rather symbolically represents the fact that the point of 
consciousness is modified by outlying neural processes as well as 
by those most directly concerned in effecting the required adjust- 
ment." I must say frankly that in my own experience I fail to 
find anything that corresponds to this description. Dr. King seems 
to me to have described a hypothetical entity which, at any rate, 
is most unlike the content of consciousness. And if we admit 
(as Dr. King seems in another connection to do) that Professor 
James is right in identifying consciousness and its content, intro- 
spection would seem to show that consciousness is no such 
"unitary existence without parts," as Dr. King maintains, but that 
it is "composed of states of varying intensities" and that its parts 
cluster " about a center with different degrees of intensity and ad- 
hesion" — in short that it is best represented, as suggested above, 
by a field of vision, and that the fringe is a real psychic (not 
merely neural) fact. 

1 Baldwin, "Feeling and Will," p. 85. 



THE ELEMENTS OF PSYCHIC LIFE 1 3 

in our inward states which cannot by any possibility 
become an element of a percept or of an image. It 
is an inward illumination which falls on the stream 
of sensations and ideas." * If this view be the true 
one (and I believe it is), feeling will be seen to be 
very intimately related to the indescribable, non-ra- 
tional phenomena of the background. It is true 
that both for feeling and for these other experiences, 
by an artificial transformation, sensations may in a 
sense be substituted ; but when this substitution has 
been made, the real feeling and the real background 
phenomena have vanished. 2 There is in every com- 
plex which involves either of these a factor which 
simply is not to be objectified or described. So far 
as accurate, scientific description is concerned, psy- 
chology must here " throw up the sponge." In this 
respect, feeling and the fringe experience differ in 
toto from sensation and ideation. 3 

1 Hoffding, "Outlines of Psychology," p. 89. 

2 Cf. Royce, "Outlines of Psychology," pp. 107-112. 

3 In an article in the Psychological Review (January, 1906), on 
which this chapter is largely based, I overemphasized the close 
relationship between feeling and the fringe, making no clear dis- 
tinction between the two and proposing that the term " feeling " 
be used for both. The suggestions of my friend Mr. Truman and 
further thought of my own upon the matter have led me to modify 
this formulation of the subject, as indicated in the text. Though 
feeling and the fringe region are closely related, they should not 
be identified ; for such a course would not only have the effect of 
confusing still more the whole vexed problem of feeling (which is 
already perhaps the most confused and obscure problem in psy- 
chology) ; but jt would also ignore the fact that certain feelings 



14 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

Feeling and the background, therefore, although 
clearly distinguishable, are, as I have indicated from 
the outset, very closely related. Together they form 
the second of the two great divisions in our classifica- 
tion of psychic elements. In the following pages I 
shall refer to this division of non-rational and non- 
cognitive fringe and feeling phenomena as the " feel- 
ing background," or the " feeling mass," or some 
equivalent expression. 

The character of our first great division of psychic 
elements — ideation and sensory experience — is 
clear enough, being described in detail by all text- 
books on psychology. The second division of our 
classification, however, is not dealt with so generally 
nor so carefully by psychologists. For this reason, 
therefore, and also because of its important bearing 
on the religious life, it demands from us especial 
study. What, then, more in detail, are the charac- 
teristics of this vast feeling background ? 
1 First of all should be mentioned its intimate and 
direct relation to the life of the organism. Sensation 
and ideation relate us to the outer world removed 
from us by time and space ; the feeling mass of which 
I speak is indissolubly connected with our vital 
functions. So far as we are conscious of these func- 
tions at all, that consciousness belongs mainly to the 
affective life. Ccenaesthesia — as the German term 

(e.g. intense pleasure-pain) sometimes reach the center of atten- 
tion. The two must therefore be distinguished, though their 
close relationship must always be kept in mind. 



THE ELEMENTS OF PSYCHIC LIFE 1 5 

Gemeingejiihl implies — is a matter of feeling, in 
the broad sense. The conscious rhythms of the 
bodily processes — especially as indicating healthy 
or unhealthy conditions of the organism — are 
summed in this common marginal feeling. 1 In short, 
we may say that ideation is man's consciousness so 
far as he is a rational being ; the affective background 
is his consciousness so far as he is a living organism. 
It is this which is in connection with our vital needs. 
The instinctive desires and impulses have their roots 
in it, and get their power from it; the inborn reactions 
upon the environment, so far as they are conscious, 
the native antipathies and tendencies, our deepest 
loves and hates — all these are parts of it and grow 
up out of it. In fact, so inextricably bound up is it 
with life and all that life means, that it might well 
be called the vital background. 

This vital background seems to be the primary 
form of consciousness. 2 In all probability the lower 

1 " Gemeingefiihl ist die 'Resultante der sinnlichen Gefuhle' 
(Wundt), das ' Totalgefuhl in welchem der gesamte Zustand un- 
seres sinnlichen Wohl- oder Ubelbefindens zum Ausdruck kommt' 
(Hoffding). Seine wichtigsten Bestandtheile sind, uber den deut- 
licher localisirten Muskel- und Organempfindungen, die vollig 
unbestimmten Totalempfindungen, ein Conglomerat von beton- 
ten, aber meist nicht sehr starken Gefuhlen, welche ihre Ursprung 
in inneren Veranderungen unserer Organe haben (Ziegler)." — 
Elsenhaus, " Ueber Verallgemeinerung der Gefuhle," Zeitschrijt 
fiir Psychologie, XXIV, 203. 

2 " The original awareness of consciousness is an affective state, 
and as consciousness is the form of all subjectivity, so sensibility, 
feeling, is its first content." Baldwin, "Feeling and Will," p. 84. 



r 



1 6 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

forms of conscious life have little besides this. Idea- 
tion would seem to belong exclusively to the highest 
vertebrates, and sensation also becomes less varied 
and less definite as we work down in the scale of con- 
sciousness. Our " lower" senses have the most 
feeling (in the broad sense) and the intellectual ones 
the least, and ? as Ward points out, our organic 
sensations, which seem to come nearest to those of 
the mollusk, lack almost any assignable quale. The 
infant's consciousness is void of what we know as 
sensations and ideas; 1 it is a "buzzing blooming 
confusion." "In place of the many things which we 
now see and hear," says Ward, "not merely would 
there then be [i.e. in the infant's consciousness] a 
confused presentation of the whole field of vision and 
a mass of undistinguishable sounds, but even the 
difference between sights and sounds themselves 
would be without its present distinctness. Thus, 
the farther back we go, the nearer we approach to a 
total presentation having the character of one general 
continuum in which differences are latent." 2 

Out of this "continuum," this matrix, this original 

1 " All it has at first is feeling, and feeling of one kind. This 
feeling has no meaning whatever, of any kind." " Feeling and 
Will," p. 150. 

2 Encyclopaedia Britannica, article " Psychology." It will be 
noticed that in adopting Ward's view of the primitive conscious- 
ness instead of Spencer's or Stanley's I have avoided those diffi- 
culties which Hoflfding, Tawny, and others urge against the 
possibility of feeling in the narrower sense being the original form 
of psychic life. 



THE ELEMENTS OF PSYCHIC LIFE 1 7 

chaos, big with all the possibilities of conscious life, 
are gradually differentiated the various forms of 
sensation and of ideation. Consciousness is not put 
together from sensations ready made by the outside 
world; but, from the comparatively homogeneous 
mass of the feeling background, certain pulses of 
psychic life more prominent than the rest become 
more definite, more distinct, and by a gradual pro- 
cess evolve into sensations. 1 The same is true of the 
differentiation of ideas. The process seems analo- 
gous to that of biological evolution, and might very 
well be described by Spencer's famous definition — 
"a progress from indefinite, incoherent homogeneity 
to definite, coherent heterogeneity, through successive 
differentiations and integrations." 

1 Cf. a recent article by Dr. A. E. Davies entitled " An Analysis 
of Elementary Psychic Processes" {Psychological Review, XII, 
166-206), based upon experiments in light perception, in the labora- 
tory of the Ohio State University. Dr. Davies holds that the ele- 
mentary psychic processes are not cognitive, but rather of the nature 
of feeling. The first stage of a perceptive process is vague, indefi- 
nite, and not to be described further than by saying that it belongs 
to the affective, rather than to the cognitive life. One of his sub- 
jects expresses what seems to have been the common experience 
of them all by saying, "My feeling for the illumination came be- 
fore my perception of the object." The conclusion to which Dr. 
Davies comes he expresses thus, " Our most elementary psychic 
processes are feeling processes" ; and he adds in another connec- 
tion that we must "rid ourselves of the false psychology which re- 
gards feeling as running its course within a closed circle beginning 
and ending with the gratification of its own impulses. Feeling, 
we are warranted in saying, exhibits, no less than conation, 'an 
inherent tendency to pass beyond itself and become something 
different.' " 
c 



1 8 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

But while much that in the mollusk and the infant 
belonged to this feeling mass has with the adult 
human being developed into clear-cut sense percep- 
tion and thought, a great part of the most developed 
human consciousness retains its primitive, rich, un- 
differentiated character. The logical and orderly 
mind of the most " cut and dried " logician, who thinks 
in abstract concepts and reasons in fixed syllogisms 
of the figure Barbara, has still a great mass of 
"fringe" and "margin" and "background." The 
human logic machine is an invention of the imagina- 
tion ; and the most abstract thinker has always more 
of the "buzzing blooming confusion" in the back of 
his mind than he would be willing to confess. And 
fortunate it is for him that it is so, for without it he 
would lack one of the most fecund sources of ideas 
with which human nature is blessed. Thought aris- 
ing from the feeling background is a common expe- 
rience of every one. Who has not listened to an 
argument and jelt its fallacy long before he could put 
his ringer on the weak spot ? Who has not searched 
for a lost name and caught the tingle of it, the "feel" 
of it, long before he could grasp its definite ideational 
or sensational form? And not only is our general 
Weltanschauung determined quite as much by the 
affective life as by logical arguments, but in their 
very inception also, many of our most inclusive and 
most important thoughts and systems of thought come 
to us in a whirl of feeling most vague and indetermi- 
nate at first, and have to be worked out afterwards 



THE ELEMENTS OF PSYCHIC LIFE 1 9 

into clear formulation. The logical form is often 
the last product; the idea germinates in the feel- 
ing background and grows up out of it. Probably 
most philosophers — certainly many of them — feel 
their thoughts as vague tendencies long before they 
can express them. "The condition behind discovery 
is a sense or feeling of harmony or discord among 
phenomena, and of adjustment or maladjustment 
between consciousness and its objects." * 

The entire psychic life is characterized by varying 
degrees of differentiation. Between the clearly 
focalized idea and its fringe, between the discrimi- 
nated sensation and its feeling tone, there is no impas- 
sable gulf that may not be spanned by imperceptible 
gradations. With respect to differentiation Leib- 
nitz's lex continui holds of the mind. Especially is 
this illustrated in the feeling mass. Some of its 
material has almost forced itself out of the obscurity 
of the background into the clear consciousness of 
ideation or sense perception or some compound of 
these ; some has even reached the focal point of at- 
tention, as, for instance, intense pain. From this 
maximum of differentiation the feeling mass slopes 
down through all degrees of discrimination, obedient 
to the law of Leibnitz, until it reaches the zero line. 
There is good reason, moreover, to believe that the 
Father of German Psychology was right in another of 
his assertions, and that the feeling background does 

1 Starbuck, "The Feelings and their Place in Religion," 
American Journal of Religious Psychology and Education^ I, 168. 



20 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

not stop with the zero line, but passes by a continuous 
transition into the subliminal region. Certainly, 
if there be such a thing as the " subconscious, " it is 
a continuation of the field of vital feeling ; and though 
psychologists differ in their interpretation of the sub- 
conscious region, the existence of that region not 
many doubt. Not to mention abnormal phenomena, 
experimental evidence has been adduced by Jastrow, 
Dunlop, Stratton, and others which seems to point 
toward the influence of the subliminal upon judg- 
ment. Thus in a long series of experiments Dunlop 
found that shadow lines thrown at certain angles, but 
too faint to be consciously discriminated, influenced 
the judgment of lengths of other lines; 1 and in an 
experiment of Jastrow's, the subject, who was unable 
to perceive any difference between two given weights, 
by merely guessing many times which was the larger 
succeeded in getting results much nearer correct 
than could be accounted for by chance. 2 In these 
cases the feeling background, perhaps in part above 
and in part below the threshold, seems more deli- 
cately adjusted to its environment than the cognitive, 
rational factors. 3 

1 See Stratton, " Experimental Psychology," p. 89 ; and Jastrow, 
"The Subconscious," p. 417. 

2 Jastrow, "The Status of the Subconscious," American 
Journal of Psychology, XIV, 343-353- Several similar subcon- 
scious judgments are described in Jastrow's recent work, "The 
Subconscious," pp. 425-429. 

3 How the subconscious should be construed I cannot pretend 
to say. Myers's hypothesis of a second personality seems to me 



THE ELEMENTS OF PSYCHIC LIFE 21 

The objective, describable, communicable regions 
of consciousness, ideation, and sensation may, there- 
fore, be considered as two small islands, bathed in 

unsupported by the facts. I can only suggest that from the focus 
of attention (of the conscious personality, of course) there stretches 
out an indefinitely extended field of psychic stuff, becoming con- 
stantly less differentiated, some of it passing the zero line of one's 
awareness, and flowing out in what I might call dream waves — 
or possibly disconnected, split-off pulses of consciousness — be- 
yond. These subliminal dream waves would be made up of the 
same kind of psychic material as the feeling background, only still 
less discriminated, or even cut off from the main psychic mass. 
Both would seem to be intimately connected with the life of the 
organism, and — if the experiments cited and others like them are 
worth anything — to be in some respects more responsive to cer- 
tain slight sensuous — and possibly other — changes in the en- 
vironment than is the fully conscious and rational personality. 

If the subconscious region be conceived thus as not differing 
in character of content from the conscious background, we should 
naturally expect its products, like those of the latter, to be good, 
bad, and indifferent, and thus the pathological, insane, " dissolutive" 
phenomena would be much better accounted for than on the hy- 
pothesis of a subliminal personality. It would seem, moreover, 
that different individuals differ enormously in the amount of sub- 
conscious material connected with the conscious field. And one 
thing more may, perhaps, be added; namely, that, as Professor 
James has suggested, this region seems to have another environ- 
ment besides the conscious one ; it seems to point to a beyond. 
All that I have said as to the subconscious, is, however, thrown out 
merely as a suggestion ; and even if it be true, it is but a very small 
part of the truth, — it leaves untouched a great many of the facts. 
I am aware also that the little I have said is most vague — but 
perhaps its vagueness is its only merit. So little is known as yet 
about the subconscious region that I for one have not the temerity 
to attempt to unify it. Of this, however, we may be sure: "there 
is actually and literally more life in our total soul than we are at any 
time aware of" (James, "Varieties of Religious Experience," 
P. 5")- 



22 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

the sea of vital feeling. This sea in its whole extent 
— from the subconscious up to the maximum of dif- 
ferentiation — seems to be in a constant state of tur- 
moil. It is forever boiling, so to speak, and throw- 
ing up upon the shores of the clearer consciousness all 
manner of products. Emotions are constantly com- 
ing and going, and suggesting an endless number of 
ideas and actions ; sensations normally subliminal or 
nearly so suddenly become clearly discriminated; 
ideas "pop into our minds" without any connection 
with our previous train of thought; the solution of 
the problem comes without the argument that dis- 
covered it ; a course of action we find already deter- 
mined upon, wise but apparently not based on rea- 
soning; intuitions of all sorts shoot out of the dark 
background ; the youth suddenly discovers that he is 
in love and that he has been in love for a considerable 
time without knowing it; the poet finds the poem 
half written before he thinks of writing one. This 
spontaneous character of the vital background often 
gives its contributions a sense of foreignness, a feeling 
that they must have come from some source not our- 
selves — a characteristic pointed out by Professor 
James in connection with the subconscious portion 
of this field. 1 

It is largely through this non-rational, vital feeling 
mass that we are united to our own past, to our an- 
cestors, and to the race, — in fact in a sense to all 
living things. It is the inheritor of our past and 
1 " Varieties of Religious Experience." 



THE ELEMENTS OF PSYCHIC LIFE 23 

forms what might be called a feeling memory. At 
every moment our whole outlook is colored by our 
past impressions and ideas. These are not present 
as such, — they are not distinctly remembered, — 
but a general feeling tone and tendency to reaction 
is established by them and is modified by each event 
of life ; in short the total feeling background is af- 
fected by all our thoughts and experiences in such 
a way that they influence every passing moment. 
Our total past experience is in a sense summed and 
massed in the feeling background, which thus be- 
comes a compendium of our history. But it is 
much more than that ; it is largely the storehouse of 
heredity as well. It is in the line of direct descent 
and inherits an endless amount of the wisdom gained 
with so much toil by our entire ancestry. And here 
let there be no misunderstanding. I am not claim- 
ing for the feeling mass any miraculous wisdom of 
the telepathic sort — any mysterious communica- 
tion from a Subliminal Self. Whether such it have I 
know not ; that is not the point. What I do claim 
for it is the possession of what might be called a 
racial or instinctive wisdom which seems to put it 
in touch, in a perfectly natural manner, with forces 
hidden from the clearly conscious personality and 
which makes it in many ways wiser than the indi- 
vidual. The organism — our nature as a whole — 
of which the feeling background is the expression, is 
essentially right ; it is fitted to the universe in which 
it finds itself. It is to this field of vital feeling that 



24 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

our instinctive reactions and adaptations, so far as 
conscious, belong; we do not reason to them, but 
obey necessarily a longing and an impulse which we 
simply find. This instinct feeling and impulse is 
often wiser than our reasonings. It is the accumula- 
tion of ages of experience and hence must be reck- 
oned with no less than our little store of personally 
gathered knowledge and vainly reasoned syllogisms. 
In our personal sensory experience and our logical 
conclusions we are very young ; in our feeling mass 
we are older than the race. It is through the prompt- 
ings of feeling that we respond blindly but surely to 
the whole of a situation, of which our little conscious 
selves see only a very small part. Hence the feel- 
ing mass may be said to be in touch with a broader 
environment than the reasoning part of us, and to 
keep us in touch, not only with the absent in space, 
but with the distant past and even, in a sense, with 
the future. For it binds us to the whole of nature 
and to the laws of the cosmos, and hence may well 
be called prophetic. Through it, moreover, we are 
united to the race. It is here that racial antipathies 
and racial tendencies and in fact the solidarity of the 
entire human family become manifest. Nor can we 
stop here, for it is also the one conscious tie that 
binds us to the whole of sentient life. 

This fact, moreover, that it is the affective lif e which 
in a sense unites us to the brutes can be no reproach 
to it in the opinion of any one whose ideal for 
humanity is anything else than that of an animated 



THE ELEMENTS OF PSYCHIC LIFE 25 

syllogism. For it is feeling alone that gives value to 
life. Sensation and ideation merely report on the 
facts. If man were only a cold intellect who saw and 
judged, one thing would be to him as valuable as 
another — in fact for him there would be no values 
in the universe but only truths. It is only because 
man has feelings, emotions, impulses, that anything 
in heaven or earth has value. Moreover not only 
does the feeling background create values; it also 
is often that part of a man's mental make-up which, 
for others, has value. What we love in our friend 
is not his sensations, nor chiefly his ideas and his 
reasoning power; it is principally that combination 
of indefinable psychic qualities — impulses, desires, 
likes and dislikes — which we call his disposition. 
So far, then, is the feeling mass from being something 
which a man should hope in the course of evolution 
to get rid of, that, as a fact, if he should get rid of it, 
no one would be able to find anything lovable in him, 
and he himself would be utterly unable either to love 
or even to value anything. 

In short, the feeling mass is wider than the other 
departments of psychic life, deeper than they, and 
more closely identified with the self. A change in it 
means a change in personality. Sensations and 
ideas have a communicable and universal nature; 
this non-rational residuum is peculiarly private and 
individual. It is the determinant of character — 
in one sense it is the character and the personality. 
From it the practical activity gets most of its energy 



26 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

and most of its guidance. On the other hand, though 
in one way peculiarly individual in comparison with 
ideas and sensations, it seems in another sense more 
universal than they; for it is limitless and seems to 
extend on beyond any borders we can set, and to be 
sensitive to influences to which the more clearly 
conscious part of our personality is entirely oblivious. 

II 

I have dealt thus far only with the conscious por- 
tion of our lives. But it must be recognized that many 
of our most important impulses and desires spring, so 
far as we can see, from a region of our life which is 
not conscious at all. Our psychic life is, of course, 
conditioned or paralleled by neural processes ; but it 
is not to this immediate correlate of consciousness that 
I refer, but rather to the total physiological condition 
of the organism — both of the brain and of the rest 
of the body — which, while not immediately corre- 
lated with consciousness, does affect it indirectly and 
powerfully. Our psychic life is but a portion, and 
our physical life is but a portion, of the whole man, 
and each is inextricably bound up with the other. 

The line between the fringe region of conscious- 
ness and the merely neural and physiological, though 
clear enough in principle, is not always easy to draw 
in a given case. Hence it may be that in the preced- 
ing pages I have put too much in the fringe region ; 
it may be that a juster analysis would have attributed 
some of the phenomena which I have placed there to 



THE ELEMENTS OF PSYCHIC LIFE 27 

unconscious neural processes based in turn on the 
whole organism as dominated by hereditary and 
instinctive tendencies. Of course I believe my char- 
acterization of the fringe region to be the true one. 
But if I have put on one side of the line some few 
things which belong rather on the other side, it is of 
no fundamental importance. For the one thesis 
which I wish to defend, the one contention for which 
I really care, is that the whole man must be trusted 
as against any small portion of his nature, such as 
reason or perception. These latter should, of course, 
be trusted, but they should have no monopoly of our 
confidence. The ideals which have animated and 
guided the race, the sentiments and passions which 
do us the most honor, the impulses which raise us 
above the brutes and which have been the motive 
forces of history, the intuitions which have marked 
out the saviors and the saints and the heroes of our 
earth, have not come from the brightly illuminated 
center of consciousness, have not been the result of 
reason and of logic, but have sprung from the deeper 
instinctive regions of our nature. The man as a 
whole and the instinctive origin of much that is best 
in him deserves more consideration than it has some- 
times received. For the instinctive part of our na- 
ture, in part conscious, in part unconscious, is ulti- 
mately the dominating factor in our lives and the 
source of most of our real ideals. " There is in us," 
says Maeterlinck, " above the reasoning portion of 
our reason, a whole region answering to something 



28 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

different, which is preparing for the surprises of the 
future, which is awaiting the events of the unknown. 
This part of our intelligence, ... in times when, 
so to speak, we knew nothing of the laws of nature, 
came before us, went ahead of our imperfect attain- 
ments, and made us live, morally, socially, and sen- 
timentally, on a level very much superior to that of 
those attainments." 1 

This is not " poetry" nor " mysticism," but very 
sober truth. In very deed the richness of our lives 
cannot be accounted for without appeal to this mar- 
ginal and instinctive region of our nature. There is, 
of course, nothing original in this assertion — in a 
sense it is even trite. And yet its full significance 
seems hardly to have been grasped by much of 
our contemporary psychology. The aim of the 
preceding pages has been to emphasize the impor- 
tance of this basal region. They may contain errors 
of fact and of inference. But mistakes in working 
out the detail of the subject will not prejudice the 
reader against the one contention for which I wish 
my book to stand — the insistence, namely, upon 
the immense and vital importance of our instinctive 
life as manifested in the feeling background and as 
seen particularly in the religious consciousness. Be- 
fore turning to the question of religious belief, how- 
ever, it will be necessary to consider the nature of 
belief in general. This, therefore, will be the sub- 
ject of our next chapter. 

1 " Of our Anxious Morality," Atlantic Monthly, January, 1906. 



CHAPTER II 

THE NATURE OF BELIEF 

It seemed important at the very beginning of our 
discussion to consider the nature and the place of 
what I have called the feeling background and its 
relation to the cognitive factors of our psychical 
make-up. If to the reader my treatment of this 
has seemed unnecessarily detailed, I can only refer 
him to the sequel for my justification. At any rate, 
this preliminary work accomplished, we are now at 
liberty to come to closer quarters with our theme, 
and in the present chapter shall consider the general 
nature of belief, submitting it to the same sort of 
analysis which, in the last chapter, we applied to 
psychic life as a whole. 



At the very beginning of this our second section of 
psychological analysis, however, it may be well to 
utter a word of warning lest the reader misinterpret 
the results of both these psychological chapters. 
It is the misfortune of all exposition which depends 
upon analysis that it must almost inevitably distort 
the truth. Reality in its native form resists dissec- 

29 



30 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

tion and refuses to be sorted and labelled and dock- 
eted in any cunningly devised system of pigeon- 
holes. "Nor are the things that are in one universe 
divided or cut off from one another with a hatchet." 1 
Life, the real world of our immediate experience, is 
a very different thing from any account of it ; and a 
description which should be perfectly true in the sense 
of distorting and exaggerating nothing and leaving 
out nothing, would simply give us life back again, 
with no clearer insight into its elements and their rela- 
tive importance than we had before. This, for ex- 
ample, is what Shakespeare does for us, who is of 
all poets the closest to reality just because he is 
the least analytic. 

Any investigation which, like the present one, seeks 
to analyze a portion of reality into its essential parts, 
in order to make its more important aspects capable 
of being grasped by the intellect, must, at the start, 
lay aside all pretensions to presenting the world as it 
really is in immediate experience. It must plead 
guilty to the spirits indictment in Faust, "Thou 
hast destroyed the beautiful world." But it does so 
only that it may thereby attempt to obey the behest 
of the same spirit, " In thine own bosom build it 
again, mightier and more beautiful." For our in- 
terests, as intelligent beings, are by no means 
confined to the immediate and primary experience, 
but dwell rather in a region made anew by our 
theoretical powers, a world of distinctions, defi- 

1 Anaxagoras, fragment 13. 



THE NATURE OF BELIEF 3 1 

nitions, and laws. The intellect demands that the 
immediate reality of naive experience shall be ana- 
lyzed, ordered, made over; and the resulting con- 
ceptual world, though at one remove from primal 
reality, has the advantages of clearness of outline, 
ease of comprehension and of exposition, and prac- 
tical applicability, which to the intellectual side of our 
nature more than compensate for the loss and dis- 
tortion incurred. 

The preceding chapter and the present one par- 
ticipate in the loss, and I hope also in the gain, here 
intended. Life as we know it directly and imme- 
diately is not divided into the three or four compo- 
nents with which our first chapter dealt. It is merely 
so divisible. Ideation and sensory experience and 
the feeling background are never found isolated from 
each other, but together they form a unity which is 
our conscious life. There is no pulse of conscious- 
ness which does not contain all three. It is only for 
the purposes of analytic thought, following after 
reality, that the three elements there dealt with can be 
spoken of separately. The utmost that analysis 
can say of the immediate reality is that certain pulses 
of consciousness are dominated more by one of the 
" elements " than by the others, and so may be char- 
acterized or named by it. And the same general 
qualifications must be made with respect to the pres- 
ent chapter. The three different kinds of belief with 
which we shall deal are not clearly and neatly sepa- 
rated off from each other in real life in the manner 



32 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

in which analysis and exposition must picture them. 
Thus no genuine belief is altogether devoid of 
feeling, and nearly every belief of adult life is in 
some degree intellectual. Yet if we are to do more 
than live our beliefs, if we are to reflect upon them at 
all and to come to conclusions about them, we must 
have recourse to analysis and make distinctions. 
The question whether the analytic method is justifi- 
able is really the question whether thought is worth 
while; whether we should continue to build up a 
scientific knowledge of the universe or should "turn 
and live with the animals. " 

II 

So much for the limitations and the justification 
of analysis. To come now directly to the subject of 
this chapter, belief * may be briefly defined as the 
mental attitude of assent to the reality of a given ob- 
ject. This assent may be either articulate or inar- 
ticulate, — it may be the mere immediate feeling of 
reality not as yet questioned, or it may be the more 
self-conscious acceptance of the object as real after 
doubt has made the possibility of its non-reality con- 
ceivable. 2 Belief is, therefore, as Hume pointed out 

1 How indebted I am in this chapter to Professor James's 
treatment of belief will be obvious to every one familiar with the 
"Principles of Psychology." 

2 Professor Baldwin was the first to distinguish sharply between 
these two kinds of belief ("Feeling and Will," p. 149 f.)- The 
distinction is clearly important and he considers the difference 



THE NATURE OF BELIEF 33 

long ago, something more than the mere presence of 
an idea in the mind; whether or not the object of 
consciousness shall be an object of belief will depend 
upon the " manner of our conceiving" 1 it. The ob- 
ject of belief is not merely presented or represented, 
but acknowledged and accepted as a part of the world 
of reality — in whatever sense that word may at the 
time be intended. Take Santa Claus for instance. 
The child who still retains his orthodox belief has no 
more intense and vivid image of him than he will have 
two years hence when he has ceased to believe in him. 
But the image is now coupled or tinged with a feel- 
ing of consent and acceptance which is sui generis 2 
and which at once ranks Saint Nick alongside of 
papa and mama and all good angels in the world of 
beings which most surely are and on which one may 
with confidence rely. 

so great as to forbid of the two being included under one term; 
hence he reserves the name " belief " for the articulate and self- 
conscious kind of certainty, giving to the inarticulate variety the 
name "reality-feeling." Baldwin's analysis is excellent and his 
distinction is well taken; yet it seems to me that after all the two 
states have so much in common and are so nearly related that it is 
desirable to have a common term for both, and for this purpose I 
know of none better than belief. For reality-feeling is only inar- 
ticulate belief; as Bain says, "we believe without knowing it." 
Hence I have tried to formulate my definition in such a way as to 
include both the mental states of Baldwin's discussion. 

1 "Treatise of Human Nature," p. 96 (Selby-Bigge's edition). 

2 Cf . Brentano's distinction between an idea as vorgestellt and 
the same idea as anerkannt. The difference he considers so great 
that he erects Vorstellung and Urtheil (of which belief is only a 
form) into two of the three great divisions of psychic life. 

D 



34 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

If now we apply our distorting but necessary pro- 
cess of analysis to belief, we shall find that it falls 
naturally into three distinct types, which for con- 
venience I shall call primitive credulity, 1 intellectual 
belief, and emotional belief. Just what I mean by 
these terms I shall now try to show in some detail. 

(i) When the first faint pulse of consciousness 
awakens within the infant, whatever presents itself 
to his mind is of course "real." Here in a very true 
sense esse est percipi. There is as yet no possible 
distinction between the real and the unreal, hence 
every object of consciousness is accepted as a matter 
of course and bears with it the same sort of reality 
feeling which in more sophisticated years is restricted 
to a portion only of one's mental objects. 2 Let us 
suppose, for instance, with Professor James, that the 
infant's first visual impression is a lighted candle; 
"what possible sense (for the child's mind) would a 
suspicion have that the candle was not real? . . . 
The candle is its all, its absolute. Its entire faculty 
of attention is absorbed by it. It is, it is that, it 
is there; ... no alternative, in short, suggests it- 
self as even conceivable ; so how can the mind help 
believing the candle real? The supposition that it 
might possibly do so is, under the supposed condi- 

1 Bain's term. 

2 "La credulity est un e'tat primitif qui accompagne toutes nos 
representations, fait aise" a constater chez les enfants et les igno- 
rants; . . . il s' attache naturellement a toute image ou idee qui 
occoupe la conscience sans antagoniste." — Ribot, "La Logique 
des Sentiments," p. 187. 



THE NATURE OF BELIEF 35 

tions, unintelligible." 1 So irresistible, in fact, is the 
feeling of reality in such a case that Professor Baldwin 
distinguishes it sharply from the more sophisticated 
beliefs under the name "reality-feeling." "Reality- 
feeling, at this early stage, is, in fact, simply the fact 
of feeling; nothing more, but this much. Existence 
is simply presence; but presence is existence, and 
whatever is, in consciousness, is real." 2 

Another instance of this original identification of 
the presented with the real is the child's belief from 
authority. He accepts whatever he is told, just as 
the new-born infant accepts ever} 7 mental object as 
real. The possibility of doubt has not as yet en- 
tered his head, hence every assertion that he hears 
comes tinged with the feeling of reality. We shall 
find this amply illustrated when we come to study 
the religion of childhood in Chapter VII. 

But primitive credulity is by no means limited to 
childhood. And it is not merely the child who tends 
to believe whatever he is told; we all do. Every 
object of consciousness that comes to us from an ex- 
ternal source — whether it be the perception of an 
external thing or a thought given us by some fellow- 
creature — tends to carry with it the same feeling of 
reality which the child has on viewing the candle. 
To the naive, unsophisticated mind (and which of us 

1 "Principles of Psychology," Vol. II, pp. 287 and 288. Cf. 
also Bain's treatment of belief as beginning in "Primitive Cre- 
dulity." 

2 "Feeling and Will," p. 150. 



36 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

is not naive and unsophisticated a large part of the 
time?) whatever is seen or heard is believed. It is 
believed until a cause for doubt arises, and doubt is 
always a secondary matter. The burden of proof 
is with the negative; and, like the prisoner at the 
bar, the newly presented object of consciousness is 
accounted innocent of deception until proved guilty. 
The doubting spirit is distinctly a secondary and 
comparatively artificial growth — whence the neces- 
sity of its inculcation, as seen in the prevalence of 
such maxims as that one should believe nothing that 
one hears and only half of what one sees, etc. The 
more primitive and unspoiled nature of the mind is ex- 
emplified by the proverbial countryman or "marine" 
to whom one may "go tell" whatever he likes with- 
out fear of disbelief. It is only after many hard 
knocks, many clear cases of deception and disap- 
pointment, that the natural credulity with which 
every one of us starts out is modified by a modicum 
of scepticism; and in even the most incredulous it 
is never completely overcome. 

The relation of primitive credulity to authority is 
obvious; the two terms are in a sense correlative. 
The authority may be that of another human being 
or of a material thing which we perceive through the 
senses and recognize as real. This latter case, in 
fact, is the most clearly marked instance of primitive 
credulity retained in adult years. From the cradle 
to the grave sense perception is a power that puts 
doubt out of the question and forces from us assent 



THE NATURE OF BELIEF 37 

to the reality of the perceived object. I cannot doubt 
that the book which I see before me is really there. 
The mere presentation is so vivid as to carry assent 
with it. "To see is to believe." So obvious is this 
that Hume made the feeling that comes with sensu- 
ous presentation the criterion of all belief. 1 As he 
also pointed out, one of the most successful ways of 
putting new life into weak and uncertain intellectual 
creeds is to bring them into close connection with 
some lively sensuous perception. 

Primitive credulity in the matter of sense perception 
is therefore psychologically of the same nature as our 
naive acceptance of what is told us by some one else. 
In the case of each, presentation and acceptance are 
one and the same. Both are in a sense authoritative. 
Belief from authority, however, has two distinct 
meanings which must be sharply distinguished. It 
may mean the acceptance of the presented because 
it is presented, as here ; or it may refer to a special 
kind of argument in which some one's authority is 
consciously used as a definite reason for belief. This 
latter use of authority belongs, not to primitive cre- 
dulity, but to what I have called intellectual belief. 
The distinction is important and must be grasped and 
kept constantly in mind throughout our discussion 
of religious belief, for the two uses of authority are 
psychologically quite different. To reason to a 
belief from some one's authority as a basis is not 

1 He defines belief as " a lively idea related to or associated with 
a present impression." "Treatise," p. 96. 



38 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

essentially different from other forms of reasoning, 
and involves a more or less complicated and deliberate 
intellectual process which is at the antipodes from the 
immediate and naive acceptance of the given. This 
latter is a much more original and primitive action of 
the mind and shows much better the natural, primal, 
unspoiled character of belief. For belief thus under- 
stood is as natural to man as breathing; it is his 
normal attitude. Doubt is quite a secondary growth 
and arises only at unusual emergencies. "As a rule 
we believe as much as we can," says Professor 
James. "We would believe everything if we only 
could." x 

(2) It is only after doubt has come that intellectual 
belief arises. To entertain reasons for believing in 
the existence of a thing presupposes the possibility 
of its non-existence. Hence belief in things absent, 
and still more in things by their nature intangible 
and invisible, has no such strong hold upon our 
nature as belief in the reality of our perceptions. 
The mental image and especially the concept do not 
carry their passports with them as do the objects of 
primitive credulity. Hence in their case we are con- 
strained to have recourse to extraneous sources of 
reality-feeling. We seek for reasons — connecting 
links of various sorts — to give to these more abstract 
intellectual objects the tingle of reality which they 
do not of themselves possess when simply fallen out 
of the blue. We not merely assent to them — we 
1 Op. cit. } Vol. II, p. 299. 



THE NATURE OF BELIEF 39 

know that we assent and we often know why we 
assent. The connecting links above mentioned are 
other and stronger beliefs which for the moment are 
assented to as certainly true. Thus I believe that 
the book which I saw a few moments ago in the next 
room is still there, spite of some one's assertion that it 
has melted away. I have here a mental image in- 
stead of a percept before my mind, — an image of the 
book standing on the shelf in the next room — and 
to this image I assent, I recognize it as a part of my 
world. This I do not because of the mere strength 
of an overmastering mental object, but because, 
though the representation is comparatively weak, I 
connect it with other facts which have a sure place 
in my "real" world, and I argue that if the book has 
melted away as suggested something incredible has 
happened to my reality. These connecting beliefs, 
or basal beliefs, from which we argue, are of various 
sorts. Sometimes they are sensuous presentations, 
sometimes they are themselves reasoned beliefs rest- 
ing on something else. Perhaps the majority of 
them may be included under the term "authority," 
using the word in the second or more rationalistic 
sense denned above. No one man is able to investi- 
gate more than an infinitesimal portion of his uni- 
verse, hence we all necessarily and rightly accept 
most of our facts — especially our scientific and his- 
torical facts — from experts. This we do, however, 
not in the way of the young child who believes what- 
ever he is told, nor of the naively credulous who 



40 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

believe because they "saw it in a book," but because 
we have reasons — better or worse — for relying 
upon the expert's knowledge and trustworthiness. 

The reliability of any reasoned belief will depend, 
of course, on the nature of the individual reasoner. 
The strength of intellectual conviction will also vary 
considerably with different individuals and with dif- 
ferent beliefs. For while the abstract concept or 
the reasoned assertion is by itself comparatively poor 
in reality-feeling, it may be so interconnected and 
entwined with our total "real" world that a refusal 
to consent to it would work havoc among all our 
accepted realities, turn all our habits of thought up- 
side down, and leave us seemingly not a foot of solid 
ground on which to stand. A conceptual belief 
thus intrenched will often be harder to dislodge 
even than one backed up by an immediate sensory 
experience. 

(3) Our third type includes all those beliefs, of 
many sorts indeed, which draw their strength from 
the field of vital feeling. They vary all the way from 
superficial cases prompted by momentary and chance 
desire to the deep promptings of vital needs. Their 
strength and their motive power and impellent force 
are simply enormous ; and this is true, not only of 
the more deep-lying kind, but of the more superficial 
as well. It is a matter of common remark among 
psychologists, logicians, historians, and others, how 
often the judgment is beclouded by the prejudice of 
feeling, and how repeatedly "the wish is father to the 



THE NATURE OF BELIEF 41 

thought." The case of Caliph Omar is typical. 
"He burnt the Alexandrian library," says Bagehot, 1 
"saying, 'All books which contain what is not in the 
Koran are dangerous ; all those which contain what 
is in the Koran are useless.' Probably no one ever 
had an intenser belief in anything than Omar had 
in this. Yet it is impossible to imagine it preceded 
by an argument. His belief in Mahomet, in the 
Koran, and in the sufficiency of the Koran, came to 
him in spontaneous rushes of emotion; there may 
have been little vestiges of argument floating here 
and there ; but they did not justify the strength of 
the emotion, still less did they create it, and they 
hardly even excused it." Emotion often so increases 
the vividness of an idea and adds to it so much reality- 
feeling as to give it almost the overpowering force 
of an immediate sense presentation. It is to faith 
what life and wings are to the bird ; and many a be- 
lief which if left to its logical supports would fall to 
the ground is able by the mere strength of its own 
imperious feeling to defy the gravitating power of 
argument and doubt. 

The case in which passion hinders clear judgment 
and results in a hastily formed and false conclusion 
is not the only type of belief arising from the forces 
of the feeling background. More deep-lying is the 
instinctive conviction of the existence of a satisfaction 
for the various organic desires. To the child who 

1 "On the Emotion of Conviction," in "Literary Studies," 
p. 412. 



42 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

has known the pleasure of food and of warmth, but 
now lacks them, the idea of his mother's breast and 
of his mother's arms has a deep coloring of reality- 
feeling. They are very real to him, he believes in 
them, because he needs them. They are necessary 
to him, therefore they must exist. This is the primi- 
tive form and the ultimate organic origin of the "will 
to believe." It is seen in all instinctive tendencies; 
hunger, thirst, the sexual impulse, the need to breathe, 
the desire for activity, the craving for society and 
fellowship and human sympathy, all are bound up 
with the inherent belief in their own possible satis- 
faction. Nor is this use of the term " belief" in 
any way an extension of its strict meaning. It is 
literally "the mental attitude of assent to the reality 
of a given object." The object in these cases is the 
thing which will satisfy the need or impulse, and the 
idea of this thing must, of course, be derived from 
some prior experience or from the instruction of 
others before belief in it can be said to arise. But 
this idea once given, it derives from the instinctive 
demand which it alone can satisfy a feeling of reality 
which almost equals that of a direct presentation. 
The desired object indeed is not present, but the 
organism insists that it shall exist somewhere, and 
that it shall become present somehow. It must be 
real, therefore it is real. The organism demands 
that its needs shall be prophetic of reality. 

The feeling background is, as I have indicated, 
the spokesman and the mouthpiece of the organism 



THE NATURE OF BELIEF 43 

and its instincts. It has long been a recognized fact 
that the instinctive and unreasoned reactions of the 
organism are often more certain, more swift, more 
appropriate, than actions which are the result of con- 
scious choice. The same kind of appropriateness, 
the same kind of adaptability to a present situation, 
in short the same kind of wisdom, belongs to the in- 
stinctive belief s, if so we may call them, in which 
the feeling background voices the demands of the 
organism. Such a belief is hardly to be eradicated 
by argument. Its roots go deeper down into the 
organic and biological part of us than do those of 
most things whose flowers blossom in the daylight 
of consciousness. 

Ill 

So much for belief in general. Now, the three 
phases or kinds of belief which we have been dis- 
cussing are particularly marked in the history of 
man's faith in the divine. Religious belief may be 
mere primitive credulity which accepts as truly 
divine whatever is presented to it as such ; it may be 
based on reasoning of various sorts ; or it may be due 
to a need of the organism, or to an emotional expe- 
rience or "intuition" — an unreasoned idea springing 
from the background and bearing with it an irre- 
sistible force of emotional conviction. As these three 
types of religious belief are to form the central part 
of our entire discussion, I shall refer to them respec- 
tively as the " Religion of Primitive Credulity," the 



44 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

"Religion of Thought" or " of. the Understanding," 
and the ''Religion of Feeling." 

This prefaced, the purpose and plan of the follow- 
ing chapters is simple. The common aim of them 
all will be to trace the development and to determine 
the relative value of the three forms of religious be- 
lief. The four chapters which immediately follow 
will deal with these phases of belief and their devel- 
opment as shown by the facts of religious history in 
four typical positive religions ; while the remaining 
chapters will concern themselves with the religious 
belief of the modern individual. 



PART II 
HISTORICAL 



CHAPTER III 

RELIGIOUS BELIEF AMONG PRIMITIVE PEOPLES 

The religions which I have chosen as typical for 
the study of belief are the primitive Animism of un- 
cultured races, the religions of India and Israel, 
and certain phases in the history of Christianity. 
It must be remembered that I am not attempting to 
write a history of these religions, but simply to trace, 
in broad lines, the development and the influence 
of the three kinds of belief already pointed out. 
Such a treatment will almost necessarily suffer from 
two quite different faults. It will, in the first place, 
be incomplete and fragmentary, and deal with types 
and tendencies rather than with the whole truth; 
and, on the other hand, it will seem at times to fall 
a prey to the opposite evil, and in order to be at all 
concrete and definite will run the risk of confusing the 
reader in details, and seeming to lose sight of the 
main issues. So far as possible I shall steer clear 
of both these dangers, but to do so with perfect suc- 
cess will be most difficult ; and I therefore warn the 
reader to prepare for both Scylla and Charybdis. 



What I have called the Religion of Primitive Cre- 
dulity will need little discussion in any of the positive 

47 



48 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

religions with which we shall have to deal. Its gen- 
eral psychological nature having been already de- 
scribed, not much remains to be said. It is seen in 
every religion, but most clearly of all in the simple 
faith of childlike races. Having as yet compara- 
tively little power of thought and slight experience 
of the kind that prompts doubt, primitive men, like 
other children, are extremely credulous, and tend to 
accept, as a matter of course, whatever is presented 
to them. To doubt the traditions of the tribe that 
have been handed down through the generations and 
taught them by their parents does not occur to them. 
Their belief is thus one of authority in the first sense 
of the word. 1 For they do not as yet argue that their 
parents must have known more than they and that, 
therefore, it is wise to accept their words as true. 
On the contrary, they have not yet reached the stage 
of argument on these subjects, and the teaching of the 
ancestors is accepted simply because presented. The 
process is identical with that of the beliefs of our 
own childhood. Thus myths about spirits and gods, 
once started, are handed down from father to son, 
and are believed implicitly because it has never oc- 
curred to them that doubt is possible. 

It is not merely in oral tradition that primitive 
credulity is to be seen. The object of naive belief 
may be presented through the eye as well as through 
the ear. The simplest case of this is the dream in 
which the savage sees his dead father or some great 

1 I.e. as described on p. 37. 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF AMONG PRIMITIVE PEOPLES 49 

and powerful departed chieftain. Such an imme- 
diate visual experience naturally passes at its face 
value; and to doubt the reality of what he sees — 
whether waking or sleeping — probably never enters 
the head of the unsophisticated savage. All anthro- 
pologists agree that primitive man makes compara- 
tively little distinction between the dream state and 
the w T aking perception, so far as their relative reality 
is concerned. He has not as yet refined upon the 
conception of the real world, and to him all things 
that he experiences are equally real, — it is the case 
of the child and the candle over again. 

Less obvious but equally typical cases of the Reli- 
gion of Primitive Credulity are seen in the nature 
gods of early races. In them auditory and visual 
presentation are combined. The sun is accepted 
as a god because so presented by tradition ; but the 
strength of the belief — the strength of the reality- 
feeling — is greatly increased by the fact that the 
divine object is directly presented to the sight. It is 
a psychological truth that " seeing is believing." 
And what is true of the sun is equally true of all the 
numerous nature gods of the savage. So long as 
primitive credulity is the chief basis of his religious 
belief, the gods are likely to be capable of direct 
presentation to the senses. There is a strength and 
comfort in being able to see and touch one's god, just 
as one may see and touch one's fellow-man, which 
makes primitive credulity possible or at least com- 
paratively easy and simple. Hence the appearance 



50 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

at an early stage of animal gods and vegetable gods, 
of mountain gods and river gods, and hence also, at 
a later stage, the value of fetichism. Fetichism is 
probably far from being a truly primitive phenome- 
non and makes its appearance only after thought has 
begun to mingle with primitive credulity, and to dis- 
tinguish clearly between the god or spirit and his 
material body. Methods are then invented by 
which the god may be induced to take up his abode 
in some object that can be carried about with one, 
and thus by an artificial means one is able to rejuve- 
nate one's faith through the unfailing strength of sen- 
suous presentation. The importance and value of 
this is seen in a good piece of psychological writing 
to be found in Nassau's " Fetichism " : " The heathen 
armed with his fetich feels strong. He believes in it ; 
has faith that it will help him. He can see it and feel 
it. He goes on his errand inspired with confidence 
of success. . . . The Christian convert is weak in 
his faith. He would like something tangible. He is 
not sure that he will succeed in his errand. He goes 
at it somewhat half-hearted and probably fails. . . . 
The weak ask the missionary whether they may not 
be allowed to carry a fetich only for show." * 

1 pp. 112, 113. A friend of mine living in Guatemala informs 
me that the Catholic missionaries who converted the natives to 
Christianity have allowed them to retain their fetiches with the 
simple substitution of the name of some saint for that of the original 
god or spirit. 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF AMONG PRIMITIVE PEOPLES 5 1 
II 

Primitive credulity remains one of the great bases 
of religious belief throughout the entire course of 
animistic faith, but it is only in the early and most 
naive stages of animism that it is practically un- 
aided by other forms of belief . What I have called 
the Religion of Thought begins very early in the 
history of every race, and as the human intellect de- 
velops it tends slowly but surely to rival or even sup- 
plant the Religion of Primitive Credulity. As this 
change takes place in the basis of man's belief, a 
corresponding transformation is brought about in 
the nature of his gods. Growing constantly farther 
and farther away from his primitive life of private 
and independent feeling, laying always less stress on 
the subjective and more on the objective and social, 
man becomes gradually " sicklied o'er with the pale 
cast of thought," and as he comes to think less in 
terms of immediately given sensation and becomes 
more imaginative and more thoughtful, his gods re- 
treat from the stone and the tree and the beast, and 
become the distant spirits who merely make use of 
these objects as their manifestations. Had there 
been a clear consciousness of the change that was 
going on, we may be sure the more advanced thinkers 
would have looked back with contempt on the crude 
notions of their benighted ancestors and doubtless 
would have prided themselves on their advanced 
thought and on the intellectual powers of their 



52 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

enlightened age; while the timorous many would 
have cast a fond and envious glance backward to the 
good old times when the eye of faith still saw in sun 
and stone, in river and tree, very god of very god. To 
such a timorous but pious soul the signs of the times 
would have seemed very bad, and the future would 
have promised only darkness and doubt. No more 
might he see with bodily eye the God of Day as he 
rose in his chariot of gold above the distant hills; 
no more might he feel upon his cheek the tender 
breath of Zephyrus or Boreas's strong blasts. The 
howling of the Storm, the roar of the Thunder, the 
bellowing of the Sea, were no longer the voices of the 
gods. The kindly Tree which had fed his ancestors 
and his own childhood was only a tree after all. No 
more when alone or in danger might he press against 
his beating heart the image in which dwelt his own 
divine companion. And when night came, with its 
shadows and its mysteries, he might not any longer 
look upward with devout eyes and behold the heavens 
beaming upon him with hosts of friendly deities. 
No, all these old gods of his fathers, so modern 
thought had taught him, were but the results of the 
activities of distant spirits, whom he might not 
see nor hear nor grasp. Well might he have cried 
in despair to the leaders of thought of his day, 
"I asked for bread and you have given me a stone; 
I wanted a god whom I could see and hear, whom 
I could know directly, you have given me a god 
whom I can only know about. I need a god whom 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF AMONG PRIMITIVE PEOPLES 53 

I can grasp and feel; you have given me one 
whom I can only reason to. You have taken away 
my Lord, and I know not where you have laid 
him." 

Such a picture as this is not purely imaginary. 
Something quite like it happened in Athens in the 
fifth century, when the populace exiled Anaxagoras 
because he taught that the heavenly bodies were not 
gods, but stones; and the condemnation and death 
of Socrates was in part due to the fact that he was 
accused of the same "atheistic" teaching. 1 With 
most peoples, to be sure, the dying out of the old 
sense gods was much more gradual and was perhaps 
hardly noticed, and the picture I have drawn is, 
therefore, largely an exaggeration. But I wished to 
emphasize the fact that the change from pure primi- 
tive credulity to the conscious use of reason in matters 
religious, and the corresponding change in the nature 
of the gods, though unnoticed and exceedingly slow, 
was really momentous. The first recognition that 
reason has rights within the realm of religion is the 
entering in of the wedge and announces the birth of 
systematic theology on the one hand and the begin- 
ning of the warfare of Science and Religion on the 
other. It was the first critical turning point in the 
history of religious belief. No longer could man, with 
his increasing intelligence, believe as his fathers had 
believed ; if faith was still to live upon the earth, it 

1 Cf. also what is said of Indra and of the Queen of Heaven in 
Chaps. IV and V. 



54 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

must seek a new basis. And had the religious con- 
sciousness of that day been as keenly awake to the 
signs of the times as is the religious consciousness 
of the present, it might have found as great reason 
as has the latter for looking out upon the future with 
uneasiness and fear. 

Far from reducing the number of gods, however, 
the first result of the application of the understanding 
to things religious was greatly to increase their num- 
ber. The belief in spirits entirely disembodied and 
flitting about, independent of all corporeal things, 
seems to have been due largely to the imagination. 
Having peopled the visible world with a host of spirits, 
the mind could not easily stop, but of its own momen- 
tum, as it were, went on to the creation of countless 
other beings in such quantities that even nature was 
poor in comparison and unable to furnish each with 
a body. Thus among the Malays " invisible spirits 
fill up the gaps which intervene in the substances of 
visible things." * The association of ideas which 
bound the notion of spirit activity to nearly every 
event of importance must also have contributed to 
the formation and support of this belief. If a per- 
son is taken ill, it is due, of course, to some evil spirit, 
visible or invisible ; and so many things are always 
happening which simply cannot be accounted for 
except by the great hypothesis of spirit action — 
that key which unlocks every mystery^ — that one 
cannot help reaching the belief in a host of disem- 

1 Ratzel, " History of Mankind." 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF AMONG PRIMITIVE PEOPLES 55 

bodied spirits, surrounding us on every hand, by 
night and day. 

The significance attributed by uncivilized peoples 
— and even by many highly civilized peoples — 
to words and names, may have had something to do 
with the origin of many spirits. It seems to require 
a high degree of mental development before one is 
able to conceive that a name is really only a name. 
Thus even in the subtle Vedanta philosophy of the 
cultured Hindus, "name and form" are important 
parts of a man's soul; and the Romans kept the 
name of their local deity so profoundly secret, in 
order to prevent an enemy from getting control of 
the god by means of it, that no one to this day has 
any notion what it was. 1 This early conception of 
the real existence of names, I suggest, may have had 
much to do in the formation of a certain class of in- 
visible deities. To this class would belong, perhaps, 
many of the deified forces of nature, personified 
qualities — which Tiele assures us are very an- 
cient deities — and such gods as " Breathless Fear" 
among the Malays and Love and Strife among the 
Greeks. The importance in Hellas of the divinities 
Nemesis, Wealth, Fortune, and other personified 
abstractions, is well known. That the process of 
creating new gods of this sort continued far down 
into historical times is shown by an incident in the 
life of Themistocles, the tone of which also indicates 
that the people were just beginning to take the pro- 

1 Cf . also the Egyptian myth of Ra and Isis. 



56 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

cedure cum grano salts. Themistocles had de- 
manded supplies from the people of Andros and 
had backed up his demand by adding that the Athe- 
nians came with two great gods, Persuasion and Com- 
pulsion. The people of Andros replied that they 
were less fortunate than the Athenians in their deities, 
for they had but two worthless ones, namely, Pov- 
erty and Inability; wherefore they could not give. 1 
But the best example of this sort of thing is, of course, 
to be found in the departmental deities of Egypt 
and early Rome, which apparently arose from the 
same general causes. 2 

The origin of the belief in tribal gods — as found 
especially among the Semites — is not so simple a 
matter. Jevons considers them all the anthropo- 
morphic survivals of the original totem; Andrew 
Lang regards at least one of them (Yahweh) as hav- 
ing originated as a "high god," or "Supreme Being' , ; 
while Herbert Spencer, of course, would have us be- 
lieve that all tribal gods — and for that matter all 
gods — were developed from an original ancestor 
worship. 3 None of the writers mentioned have been 
able to marshal sufficient evidence to make their 
hypotheses anything more than good guesses; and 



1 Cf. Campbell, "Religion in Greek Literature," p. 146. 

2 Cf. especially the di indigetes of the Romans and those of the 
di novensides that were made by splitting off epithets of the old 
gods. See Wissowa, "Religion der Romer," pp. 15-20 and 48-50. 

3 Grant Allen considers Yahweh as originally a god of fer- 
tility — see his "Evolution of the Idea of God," pp. 192-196. 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF AMONG PRIMITIVE PEOPLES 57 

it may be that we shall never know how the gods in 
question arose. But the belief in them once having 
been born, it is evident how it was kept alive. One 
did not believe in his god because he could see or touch 
him — except very rarely in dreams and visions — 
but one believed in him none the less ; and this for 
several reasons. In the first place, the fathers, who 
were so much wiser than we, and from whom we have 
learned nearly all that we know, taught us about him. 
That surely is enough for any reasonable tribesman. 
Then, too, look at the facts of life ; is he not our king ? 
Does he not lead us in war and give us victory over 
our foes ? — except, indeed, at times when he is angry 
with us for some offence known or unknown ; and, 
for that matter, is not his anger still surer evidence of 
him? The nomad's reasons for believing in his god 
are on a par with his general intellectual develop- 
ment ; but they are still reasons, and they form one 
of the chief bases for his belief. 

As a further development of the Religion of 
Thought I shall merely refer to Andrew Lang's 
"high gods of low races." These are great gods, 
usually creators, who preside over the whole earth 
and seem to have originated as an answer to the 
question, Who made all things ? They play no very 
conspicuous part in the development of religion, it 
must be admitted, but they do furnish evidence of 
the powers of generalization and inference which, 
in greater or less degree, have been at work in the 
formation of all savage faiths. According to Pres- 



58 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

cott, 1 a native Mexican historian, who bore the eu- 
phonious name Ixtlilxochitl, affirms that a famous 
Mexican king (whose name is too euphonious to men- 
tion here) worshipped an unknown god under the 
name " Cause of Causes. " And Andrew Lang 2 
tells us of a Greenlander who in conversation with a 
missionary made use of the design argument. Just 
how much these particular stories owe to missionary 
influence may well be a question; but that savages 
of even lower races than the Greenlanders and Mexi- 
cans do employ some such course of reasoning can 
hardly be doubted. 

The Religion of the Understanding has only its 
rude beginnings in the early history of the race ; its 
complete flower is to be found in the more highly 
developed religions and in modern thought. Having 
considered very roughly its general position in primi- 
tive times, I shall, therefore, leave it for the present 
and devote the rest of this chapter to the influence of 
the feeling background on early religious belief. 



Ill 

In dealing with the Religion of Feeling as found 
among uncivilized peoples, it will be necessary to 
confine ourselves largely to the less agreeable, less 
trustworthy, less normal aspects of the feeling back- 

1 "Conquest of Mexico," Vol. I, p. 194. 

2 "The Making of Religion," p. 199. 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF AMONG PRIMITIVE PEOPLES 59 

ground. There is, of course, a saner side to the sav- 
age's religious feelings, as is seen in his unreasoned 
demand for some sort of higher power, and in his in- 
sistence in all but the lowest stages of culture that 
this higher power shall not be indifferent to human 
morality. Yet, while this is true, there is very little 
of concrete data available on this aspect of the ques- 
tion which lends itself to psychological treatment. 
And, in fact, it will surprise nobody that the most 
striking and typical characteristics of the feeling 
mass in early peoples should be fantastic and bizarre. 
Just as the theological reason at this stage is charac- 
terized largely by its fallacies, so we must expect to 
find the products of the feeling background often 
verging on the abnormal or the positively insane. 
This, of course, must not be allowed to discredit the 
Religion of Feeling in all stages of its development. 
The mad ravings of the "shaman" are, indeed, far 
from possessing beauty or trustworthiness ; yet they 
will hardly prejudice the reader against the fairer 
products of this same field, unless he is also willing 
to conclude that because human reason is untrust- 
worthy in the Australian it is equally so in Aristotle. 

But, however this may be, our question, for the 
present at least, is the purely psychological one as to 
. the importance of the f eeling mass on early religious 
belief. 

Men at a low stage of culture are much more domi- 
nated by the feeling background than are their civil- 
ized brothers or descendants. As society develops 



60 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

and as communication becomes more important, 
man lays greater emphasis on the common and 
communicable, and attributes to it constantly greater 
"reality" as compared with his purely private and 
incommunicable experiences. Nevertheless there are 
few human beings so "sicklied o'er with the pale 
cast of thought" as to have lost all sense of the power 
of the background ; and with men at an early stage 
of civilization the feeling mass often breaks through 
all restraints and asserts itself in temporary but com- 
plete and unchecked mastery. 

An example of this is seen in the religious dances 
of nearly all savage tribes. These may be imitative 
of the deified animal, as in the seal dance of some of 
our Indians. Or it may be less wild, though hardly 
less emotional, as the Arapaho Sun Dance, in which 
the participants dance solemnly to the honor of their 
god at frequent intervals for three days — especially 
at sunrise and sunset — during which entire time 
they abstain from food, the ceremony being accom- 
panied by song and drum, and ending mid great 
fervor and excitement. 1 

Similar dances are found among nearly all the 
tribes of both Americas. To the semi-civilized 
Peruvians the dance was so important in all religious 
celebrations that the name for a great religious feast 
really meant dance. 2 Races of all degrees of civiliza- 

1 Geo. A. Dorsey, "The Arapaho Sun Dance," Field Columbia 
Museum, Anthropological Series, No. 4. 

2 J. G. Muller, " Geschichte der Amerikanischen Urreligion," 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF AMONG PRIMITIVE PEOPLES 6 1 

tion, in short, from the Australians up to the Greeks, 
have found in the dance the best way of arousing and 
of expressing their religious emotion. In fact one 
of the best examples of this social religious phenome- 
non that we possess is the Thracian cult of Dionysos, 
which was adopted by the Greeks in spite of the 
sober and unemotional nature of their religion and in 
spite of the emphasis which Greek thought laid upon 
the great distance between gods and men. I quote 
from Rohde's description: "The rite was performed 
on hilltops, in the darkness of night, by the uncer- 
tain light of torches. Music resounded, the crashing 
of brazen cymbals, the rolling thunder of a great 
drum, and the deep note of the flute ' enticing to 
madness,' whose soul was first awakened by the 
Phrygian Auletes. Excited by this wild music the 
band of worshipers danced with shrill cries. . . . 
In a whirling, raving, rushing circle the inspired 
throng danced over the hillside. ... So they raged 
till their emotions were aroused to the utmost pitch, 
and in sacred madness they precipitated themselves 
upon the beast chosen for offering. . . . The par- 
ticipants in this sacred dance were thrown into a sort 
of madness, a tremendous overtension of the whole 
being ; a kind of rapture seized them in which they 
seemed to themselves and to others 'mad, pos- 
sessed.' .... This powerful intensification of 
feeling had a religious meaning, in that only through 
such overtension and expansion of his being did 
man feel able to come into touch and communion 



62 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

with beings of a higher order, with the god and his 
throng of spirits. . . . This 'ekstasis' was con- 
sidered a sacred madness, in which the soul having 
fled from the body became united with the god, in a 
condition of 'enthusiasm.' Those seized with this 
were called evOeoc; they lived in the god, were in 
the god. While still in the finite ego they felt and 
enjoyed the fullness of an infinite life." * 

The effect of all this on belief is obvious. Emo- 
tion always carries its credentials with it, and — 
except by unusually intellectual and introspective 
persons — is regularly taken at its face value. One 
does not reason from it to belief ; it is a condition of 
belief. The dance results in a sense of freedom and 
liberation from the conventional limitations of cus- 
tom and thought. Ordinary social restraints are 
thrown aside, the affective background of the in- 
dividual, roused to greater and greater excitement 
by the contagious excitement of the crowd, gains 
full control, and the feeling of personality, no longer 
hemmed in by the objective life, swells past all 
limits and seems to take on an over-individual 
character. The immense amount of feeling thus 
aroused centers around and crystallizes about the idea 
of the god in whose honor the dance is performed, 
until as a result the god is felt by the participants to 
be actually within them. 

But beside the public dances and similar ceremo- 

1 Rohde, "Psyche," Vol. II, pp. 18-20. See also Miss Harri- 
son's "Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion," Chap. VIII. 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF AMONG PRIMITIVE PEOPLES 63 

nies in which the people at large partake and from 
which they all as a body receive some share of the 
divine afflatus, there are related phenomena ex- 
perienced only by particular individuals, without the 
assistance of the excitement and contagion of a crowd. 
These favored few feel, at times, the vast emotional 
background of their minds boiling up with strange 
turmoil, and flinging out into clear consciousness 
certain products which they cannot recognize as 
of their own making, while their limbs and muscles 
seem animated by a power not their own. 

In its milder form such an experience results in the 
doctrine of "familiar spirits." "There are times," 
says Tylor, "when powers and impressions out of the 
course of the mind's normal action, and words that 
seem spoken to him by a voice from without, mes- 
sages of mysterious knowledge, of counsel or warn- 
ing, seem to indicate the intervention of, as it were, 
a second superior soul, a familiar demon." * 

A more violent form of the experience referred to 
is interpreted as the actual possession of the man, 
mind and body, by a spirit, not whispering to him 
from without, but dwelling within him, for the time, 
and controlling all his thoughts and actions. It is 
not every one who is thus favored by the spirit world, a 
peculiar disposition is required ; and those who have 
the prerequisite nervous make-up are reverenced as 
persons especially close to the spirits, and hence from 
these the priests are often taken. Thus among 

1 "Primitive Culture," Vol. I, p. 182. 



64 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

the natives of Chili the " priests" or "jugglers" 
are " generally chosen while children to be initiated 
in the mysteries of this profession, from among those 
who are most effeminate, and such as happen to be 
subject to epilepsy or St. Vitus dance are considered 
as especially marked out for the service of the jug- 
glers." * Among the Indians of Guiana, if the 
peaiman, or priest-magician, has no son to succeed 
him, he chooses a boy with an epileptic tendency and 
trains him up in such a way as to accentuate his 
native pathological condition. 2 The same epileptic 
symptoms are the tokens by which are chosen the 
shamans of the Mongols and Lapps, the jongleurs 
of India, the gangas in Africa — in short the inter- 
preters of the gods the world over. 

Given this naturally nervous temperament, a 
special preparation calculated to accentuate the ab- 
normal excitability is often necessary before the 
would-be "medicine -man" or "shaman" is able at 
will to bring about the phenomena of possession. 
Thus in Guiana to become a peaiman, the candidate 
has to undergo a painful and severe trial of endurance. 
"He has to undergo long fasts, to wander alone in the 
forests, houseless and unarmed, and with only such 
food as he can gather ; and he has to accustom himself 
to drink fearfully large draughts of tobacco juice 
mixed with water. . . . Maddened by the draughts 
of nicotine, by the terrors of his long, solitary wander- 

1 Kerr, "Voyages," Vol. V, p. 405. 

2 Im Thurn, "Among the Indians of Guiana," p. 335. 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF AMONG PRIMITIVE PEOPLES 65 

ings and fearfully excited by his own ravings, he is 
able to work himself at will into those frantic passions 
of excitement during which he is supposed to hold 
converse with the kenaimas (evil spirits) and to 
control them." * 

To bring about the phenomena of possession usu- 
ally requires not only a long training, but particular 
preparation in each case. Thus among the Carib- 
beans the piaje or magician needs several hours of 
preparation before he can bring himself into the 
desired condition. This he does by blowing tobacco 
smoke into the air, murmuring strange words which 
cannot be understood, stamping on the ground, etc. 
Fasting and the use of narcotics are especially 
common means in all parts of the world for weaken- 
ing the body and exciting the mind to the proper 
pitch. 

The most typical example of this sort of possession 
is the shamanism of Siberia. One of the best ac- 
counts of this is that contained in Radlofl's "Aus 
Siberien," given to him by trustworthy native inform- 
ants who themselves believed that the shaman was 
actually possessed by the spirits of the ancestors — 
for in Siberia it is not the gods, but the ancestral 
spirits, who control the shaman. "The individual 
destined by the might of the ancestors to be a shaman 
feels suddenly a drowsiness and languor in his limbs, 
which shows itself through a violent trembling. 

1 Im Thurn, op. cit., p. 334. For an account of a similar pre- 
liminary course of training, see Crantz's "History of Greenland." 



66 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

A violent, unnatural yawning falls upon him, a heavy 
weight lies upon his breast, violent inarticulate cries 
force themselves from him, a shivering fit shakes him, 
he rolls his eyes violently, springs up suddenly and 
spins around in a circle until he falls down, covered 
with sweat, and rolls on the floor in epileptic convul- 
sions and spasms. His limbs are entirely without 
feeling, he seizes whatever comes under his hands 
and swallows without purpose whatever he has 
grasped. ... All his sufferings become stronger 
until at last he seizes the shaman drum and begins 
to shamanize [scharnanisiren]" — that is, to give an- 
swers, predict the future, etc., in the name of the 
ancestral spirits. 1 

Williams and Calvert report similar phenomena 
in Fiji. The priest who is consulted as to the future 
anoints himself with oil. "In a few minutes he 
trembles ; slight distortions are seen in his face and 
twitching movements in his limbs. These increase 
to a violent muscular action, which spreads until the 
whole frame is strongly convulsed and the man 
shivers as with a strong ague fit. The priest is now 
possessed by his god and all his words and actions 
are considered as no longer his own, but those of the 
deity who has entered into him. Shrill cries of 
'It is I,' 'It is 1/ fill the air, and the god is thus 

1 For a similar account, see a letter from Herr von Matjuschkin, 
given in Horst's "Zauber-Bibliothek," and still better, V. M. 
Mickhailovskii, "Shamanism in Siberia," Jour. Anth. Inst., 
XXIV, 62-100, and 126-158, particularly 65-79. 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF AMONG PRIMITIVE PEOPLES 67 

supposed to notify his approach. While giving the 
answer the priest's eyes stand out and roll, as in a 
frenzy ; his voice is unnatural, his face pale, his lips 
livid, his breathing depressed, his entire appearance 
like that of a furious madman. The sweat runs 
from every pore and tears start from his eyes; after 
which the symptoms gradually disappear." * 

Instances like these could be cited from almost every 
land ; but they all bear so unmistakable a family 
resemblance that the two cases quoted will serve as 
types for all. 2 

That many of the contortions of these medicine 
men are mere pretense, and that perhaps most of 
their utterances while in the state of possession are 
spoken with the purpose of mystifying and deceiving 
the bystanders, is probably the case ; yet no one can 
doubt that much of the phenomena of possession is 
perfectly genuine, and that the shamans themselves 
feel actually controlled by a foreign power, and be- 
lieve even more devoutly and fervently in the presence 
and power of the spirits than do the most credulous 
of the onlookers. Thus good David Crantz in his 
"History of Greenland" tells us that some even of 
those "angekoks" (shamans) "that have renounced 

1 "Fiji," Vol. I, p. 224. 

2 For other cases see Tylor, "Primitive Culture"; Jevons, 
"Introduction"; Tennant's "Ceylon" ; Lombroso, "L'Uomo di 
Genio" ; Horst, "Deuteroskopie" and his "Zauber-Bibliothek" ; 
Erman, "Reise um die Erde"; Schoolcraft, "Indian Tribes"; 
Krause, "Die Tlinkitindianer" ; Leems, "Nachricht iiber die 
Lappen"; Mickhailovskii, "Shamanism in Siberia," etc. 



68 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

both their heathenish infidelity and these impostures 
with it, maintain that they have fallen into such a state 
as if they had been beside themselves, and then cer- 
tain images have arisen before them which they then 
took to be revelations, but afterward they seemed to 
them like a dream. . . . Nor is it to be denied that 
the father of lies may have had a hand in their 
legerdemain, to procure credit for these whom he 
may use as his servants, and to befool the poor people. 
Therefore the baptized Greenlanders, even those that 
have been angekoks themselves, persist in it that the 
greatest part is indeed delusion, but that some inter- 
position of spirits is also mixed with it, something 
which they now abhor, but cannot describe." * 

The phenomenon of possession and its accompany- 
ing belief retains its original character throughout all 
the stages of savage life and continues even into civ- 
ilization. Several Shinto and Buddhist sects among 
the cultured Japanese regularly practice a kind of 
hypnotism which results in what they consider posses- 
sion by one of their gods. 2 Nowhere is the phenome- 
non found in greater prevalence than in modern 
China, and some of the best descriptions we have of 
it are given in Dr. Nevius's book on ''Demon Posses- 

1 For similar statements by numerous Siberian shamans, see 
Mickhailovskii, pp. 138 and 139. 

2 See the very interesting book "Occult Japan," by Percival 
Lowell. He who would be possessed goes through a long course 
of physical and mental training tending to make the mind as blank 
as possible. The actual process of "possession" is a clear case 
of hypnotism. See especially pp. 4-7, 134, 135. 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF AMONG PRIMITIVE PEOPLES 69 

sion." The Chinese variety differs from that of Si- 
beria and Fiji in not being confined to a professional 
class nor requiring any preparation or training, and 
also in being generally looked upon as a disgrace 
rather than as an honor, it being evil spirits and not 
the gods who control the subject. One of the cases 
given by Dr. Nevius is so instructive — the descrip- 
tion being in the words of the sufferer himself, — 
that I shall give a brief account of it here. One night, 
says Mr. Kwo, the narrator, "a spirit came, appar- 
ently in a dream, and said to me, 'I am Wang Mu- 
niang. I have taken up my abode in your house.' 
It said this repeatedly. I had awakened and was 
conscious of the presence of the spirit. I knew it 
was a shie-kwei [evil spirit] and as such I resisted it, 
and cursed it, saying, ' I will have nothing to do with 
you.'" About a week afterward, Mr. Kwo goes 
on to say, a feeling of uneasiness and restlessness 
came over him which he could not control and he felt 
impelled to go to a gambler's den, where he lost con- 
siderable money. He went there twice again and on 
his return home the third time fell down frothing at 
the mouth and was carried to his house. "I soon 
became violent, attacking all who ventured near 

me For five or six days I raved wildly, and 

my friends were in great distress. They proposed 
giving me more medicine, but the demon speaking 
through me replied, 'Any amount of medicine will be 
of no use.' My mother then asked, 'If medicine is 
of no use, what shall we do?' The demon replied, 



)o THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

' Burn incense to me and submit yourself to me, and 
all will be well.' My parents promised to do this and 
knelt down and worshiped the demon, begging it to 
torment me no longer. Thus the matter was arranged, 
I all the time remaining in a state of unconsciousness." 
When Mr. Kwo came to, he refused to worship the 
demon and again lost consciousness. At length his 
parents prevailed upon him to consent, and they 
erected a shrine to the demon, before which they 
made prostrations and burned incense. "The spirit 
came at intervals, sometimes every few days, and 
sometimes after a period of a month or more. At 
these times I felt a fluttering of the heart, and a sense 
of fear and inability to control myself, and was 
obliged to sit or lie down. I would tell my wife 
when these symptoms came on, and she would run for 
a neighboring woman less timid than herself; and 
they two burned incense to the demon in my stead, 
and received its directions, which they afterward com- 
municated to me, for though spoken by the lips I had 
been entirely unconscious of them." During one of 
the absences of the demon Mr. Kwo was converted 
to Christianity, owing to the promise of the missionary 
that if converted he would be no more troubled, and 
he at once tore down the demon's shrine. "A few 
days afterward the demon returned, and, speaking 
through me, of course, a conversation ensued be- 
tween it and my wife, which was as follows: 'We 
understood that you were not to return. How is 
it that you have come back again?' The demon 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF AMONG PRIMITIVE PEOPLES 7 1 

replied, 1 1 have returned but for one visit. If your 
husband is determined to be a Christian, this is no 
place for me.' ' What do you know of Jesus Christ ? ' 
they asked. The answer was, 'Jesus Christ is the 
great Lord over all ; and now I am going away and 
you will not see me again.' This," says Mr. Kwo, 
"was actually the last visit; and we have not been 
troubled since." * The case of Mr. Kwo is typical of 
a score of cases reported in Dr. Nevius's book. 

As I pointed out at the beginning of this discus- 
sion, possession is a matter of the vast background 
of feeling, involving sometimes only a mild sense of 
spiritual presence, at others bringing into play the 
subconscious field — as in the case of Mr. Kwo. 
In every case it is an emotional experience, crystal- 
lized about and usually roused by the idea of a spirit. 
The sense of strangeness or otherness which so often 
accompanies the activity of this basal field of con- 
sciousness, being inevitably connected with the idea 
of the spirit or demon which forms the nucleus of the 
experience, it necessarily follows that the whole 
should be regarded as an experience of the presence 
of the spirit in question. Hence the individual's be- 
lief in the particular spirit receives an increment of 
strength which neither reasoning nor sensation nor 
both combined could bring ; for the emotional expe- 
rience goes to the very depths of the man's being. 

The feeling side of the experience is doubtless 

1 J. L. Nevius, " Demon Possession and Allied Themes," 
Chap. II. The same phenomenon is found in Southern India. 
See Monier-Williams, " Brahmanism and Hinduism," p. 252. 



72 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

much the same among all races; but the interpre- 
tation differs with the latitude and longitude — in 
fact with individuals living side by side. In Siberia 
it is the good spirits of the ancestors who possess the 
shaman; in China it is the evil spirits who possess 
the people. As we go higher in the scale of religions 
we find possession is no longer due to spirits, but to 
the gods, as in Japan, or to the god, as in early Israel. 
The content of the belief depends always on the 
ruling ideas of the community, and hence in no two 
countries or ages is it exactly the same. But the 
jorm of the belief is everywhere identical; on the 
essential of possession all peoples of every race or 
time agree — namely that it is possession. Whether 
it be the friendly ancestor spirits that possess one, 
as the shamans think, or whether it be the father of 
lies as David Crantz and his Greenland converts 
think, or whether it be demons and evil spirits as 
Dr. Nevius and the Chinese think, they all agree 
in maintaining that "some interposition of spirits 
is mixed up with it." And whatever those may 
think who have never had the experience, he 
who has once been "possessed" is convinced, with 
a faith that cannot be shaken, that he has been 
in immediate contact with the spirit world. This 
is the only kind of faith that succesfully defies and 
outlives a real conversion to a new religion. The 
Christian neophyte may become fully convinced that 
his idol or his sacred tree, which he saw, or his great 
nature god to which he reasoned, was no god at all ; 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF AMONG PRIMITIVE PEOPLES 73 

but if he has ever been " possessed" by one of the 
spirits of his old religion he can never cease to believe 
in it. He may now call it a devil instead of a god, as 
Crantz's Greenlanders did ; but before the mission- 
ary can convert him from believing that these spirits, 
under whatever name, exist, the missionary him- 
self will be converted, as witness Crantz and Dr. 
Nevius. The "Religion of Feeling," to be sure, 
requires the idea of a spirit or a god to crystallize 
about, and this must be furnished it by the senses 
or the understanding; but once formed, it fur- 
nishes religious belief a support so strong that it 
seems well-nigh impregnable. 



CHAPTER IV 

RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN INDIA 

Although the aim of this book is to discover the 
form and basis of religious belief rather than its con- 
tent, it will be necessary to pay considerable attention 
to the latter if we are to understand the former; 
it being impossible to discuss intelligently the ques- 
tion why man believes without taking into considera- 
tion what he believes. This will be particularly 
manifest in our treatment of the religions of India 
and Israel. In each of these religions we shall have 
to take up in some detail the content of the belief in 
order to understand its form and the psychological 
forces at work in its development. 



Little need be said of the Religion of Primitive 
Credulity in India. In all races this form of belief 
is essentially the same. As every one knows, the 
authority of ancestral tradition has always been one 
of the dominant forces in the popular religions of 
the Hindus. What I have said in another connection 
concerning the nature of this phase of belief is ap- 
plicable here, so that all I need do is to point out the 

74 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN INDIA 75 

nature of the gods that were correlative to this type 
of faith and to trace the gradual decline of the Reli- 
gion of Primitive Credulity before the advance of the 
Religion of Thought. This decline is betokened in 
a general way by the change in the nature of the gods ; 
for although primitive credulity, of course, still plays 
an important part in belief even when the gods have 
ceased to be visible and concrete and have become 
distant, unseen, and abstract, the change is a sign of a 
great increase in the relative importance of thought 
and of a corresponding decrease in the power and im- 
portance of the more naive type of faith. 

When we open the earlier pages of the Rig Veda, 
we find ourselves in an animistic world of polytheism 
and polydemonism in which both the Religion of 
Primitive Credulity and the Religion of the Un- 
derstanding are easily to be traced. The great 
forces of nature are thoroughly personified and have 
definite characters. Belief in many of the gods is 
still based largely or chiefly on the fact that one has 
so been taught and that in addition one sees them 
and hence cannot disbelieve. There is Dyaus, the 
Sky, and Ushas, the Dawn, and Surya, the Sun ; if 
one be inclined to doubt of their existence all he 
has to do is to open his eyes any fine morning, and, 
behold, there they are. 

"Ushas approaches in her splendor, driving all 
evil darkness far away, the goddess." 

Surya "uprises on the slope of heaven, that mar- 
vel that attracts the sight." 



76 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

Vata, the wind god of the earliest Vedic times, is 
the physical — though of course also sentient — wind 
which one feels and hears. Agni, the god of fire, 
was, most likely, at first any and every fire — each 
separate fire being an Agni; and even in the Veda, 
Agni is still the physical flame. " Driven by the 
wind he hastens through the forest with roaring 
tongues . . . black is thy path, O bright Immortal." 
' 'He mows down as no herd can do the green fields ; 
bright his tooth and golden his beard." 1 

Soma was at first the very plant whose juice gave 
such delight, and the beginning of his worship must 
be considered as belonging with any other tree or 
plant cult. Even the great Varuna was in all 
probability at first a sky god. 

The Religion of the Understanding was, however, 
well advanced by the beginning of Vedic times, and 
there were already several gods who were mani- 
fested rather than seen in the phenomena of nature. 
As pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, the 
two forms of belief went along side by side for many 
centuries; and this is particularly well illustrated 
in the case of the sun god and the wind god of the 
Indians. For while retaining Surya as the very sun 
whom they saw, they came to believe also in another 
sun-god, Savitar, who was not the visible sun, but 
rather the Enlivener, whose activity was seen in the 
constant motion and the life-giving power of the great 

1 R. V., I, 58, 4; V, 7, 7. The translation is by Professor Hop- 
kins. See his "Religions of India," p. 107. 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN INDIA 77 

luminary. So also with the wind. In addition to 
Vata, the physical wind, we find, as much more im- 
portant, Vayu, the god of the wind, "the higher side 
of the wind as a power lying back of phenomena." 1 

But not only did the Religion of the Understand- 
ing grow up along side of the Religion of Primitive 
Credulity; it very early began to supplant it. The 
thought of the Indian, growing more abstract, could 
not be satisfied with the merely traditional or the im- 
mediately given, and the unifying tendency of the 
reason began to seek for the one power back of the 
many phenomena. The first result of this demand 
for unity was the destruction of many of the sense 
gods. Even before Vedic times, Soma had ceased 
to be the individual plant, and had become the one 
god of the many plants. In like manner Agni had 
become the one god of the many fires, and still later 
he is the god of the threefold fire, of that, namely, 
on earth, in the lightning, and in the sun. In 
similar fashion the relation of Varuna and Mitra to 
natural phenomena had been almost forgotten, and 
this loosing from nature it was which gave an oppor- 
tunity for the great moral development of these gods, 
while in turn their lofty characters tended still more 
to separate them in the minds of their worshipers 
from any particular nature objects. 

But the god in whom the Religion of the Under- 
standing first came to anything like full blossom is 

1 Hopkins, "Religions of India," p. 87. 



78 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

Indra, the storm god, who always remains intangible 
and invisible. One cannot accept him on the direct 
evidence of one's senses, but must reason to him. 
This lack of sense evidence for the god resulted in 
two things. In the first place, Indra became the 
most thoroughly anthropomorphic of the gods, and 
the one about whom the most myths were told. And 
in the second place, Indra was the only god in con- 
nection with whom the question of faith arose. One 
Vedic singer tells us that when Indra hurls his bolt 
men "have faith'' in him; in another hymn we 
read that the sun and moon and rivers run their 
course that we may " have faith in Indra," etc. 1 Now 
so much emphasis laid upon faith is a certain indica- 
tion of the presence of doubt. One does not talk 
about faith when it is complete and universal any 
more than the ordinary man thinks about digestion 
when in good health. The importance, therefore, 
attributed to " faith in Indra," is full of significance. 
Nor are we left to this inevitable inference alone, for 
two of the hymns tell us plainly that some men doubt 
the existence of Indra : — 

"Of whom, the terrible, they ask, Where is he? 
or verily they say of him, He is not." 

"Some say, indeed, Indra is not. 

"Who ever saw him? Who is he, that we may 
praise him?" 2 

The wording here is significant ; for the argument 

1 R. V., I, 55, 5; 102, 2. Griffith's translation, 
2 R.V.,II, 12,5; VIII, 8, 3. 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN INDIA 79 

seems to be that Indra is not anywhere in particular 
— i.e. at no point of space does he come in contact 
with the senses — and especially that no one has ever 
seen him. When we remember, therefore, that In- 
dra and the comparatively unimportant Rudra were 
the only gods unconnected with visible or tangible 
objects, and when we add to this the fact that only 
in the case of Indra do we find expressions of dis- 
belief, may we not feel justified in seeing here an 
illustration of the doubt which, in a previous chapter, 
I suggested might have arisen when the basis of 
belief shifted from tradition and the senses to the 
understanding? The people whose belief in their 
gods had been everywhere else strengthened by the 
immediate evidence of perception found it hard, at 
times, to feel the same certainty about a god whom 
they could neither see nor feel, but whom they must 
reason to or accept entirely on faith. The transition 
to the Religion of Thought was inevitable, if belief 
was to continue, but it was necessarily accompanied 
at first by more or less uncertainty and doubt. 

II 

One knowing the nature of the human mind could 
have told at the very beginning of religious develop- 
ment that the goal which the Religion of Thought 
would ultimately set before itself and strive to attain 
would be some form of monism. The aim of the 
reason is to explain, and the essence of explanation is 



80 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

in saying This is a case of that — i.e. in classifying 
the particular under the general. The general class, 
moreover, under which many particulars are sub- 
sumed, demands explanation as much as they, and 
can in its turn be explained only by subsumption 
under some more general class. Hence the final 
ideal and demand of thought is the reduction of all 
things to a single ultimate explanation. To stop 
short of that in any form of polytheism is for thought 
to be bafHed and to admit at least some measure of 
defeat. 

But though the demand of reason is unity, its 
problem is to construe the given universe, and the 
existence of the demand by no means implies its own 
satisfaction. To fall short of complete unity is, 
indeed, for reason to be bafHed; but it may very 
well turn out that there is in this universe an irra- 
tional element, which, if taken cognizance of, will 
necessarily baffle reason. 

Different minds give different degrees of relative 
importance to the unitary impulse of reason, on the 
one side, and to the multiplicity and apparent lack 
of homogeneity on the other. Which side of the ques- 
tion one shall espouse is often more a matter of con- 
stitution and temperament than of argument and 
proof; in general, rationalistic and empirical phi- 
losophers are born, not made. And as it is with 
separate thinkers, so it is with races; there are 
rationalistic and empirical peoples as well as 
individuals. 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN INDIA 8 1 

Both races and individuals, however, differ only 
in the relative strength of the opposing tendencies, 
not in the nature of those tendencies themselves. 
The demand of the reason is given varying degrees 
of relative importance, but in itself it is always the 
same, and always and everywhere seeks as large a 
degree of unity as is compatible with the facts of 
which it takes account. Hence the growth of the 
Religion of Thought is almost identical with the 
development of the tendency toward monism. 

The thought of India clearly shows this monistic 
tendency from the earliest times. Though at first 
it was unconscious of its real aim and final goal, we 
can seen that it was always on the way thither. 

The Rig Veda is, of course, polytheistic, but in its 
polytheism, even in the older books, is a latent tend- 
ency toward the formation of a pantheon with one 
supreme god. The thing which at first stood in the 
way of such a development was the number of candi- 
dates for the supreme office. In the earlier hymns 
looms up the majestic figure of King Varuna, who 
is described in terms more befitting a supreme god 
than ever Homer used of Zeus ; and that with some de- 
vout worshippers he retained his early importance 
and greatness to comparatively late times is seen 
from the following verses of the Atharva Veda : — 

"If two persons sit together and scheme, King 
Varuna is there as a third and knows it. 

"He that should flee beyond heaven far away, 
he would not flee from King Varuna. 



82 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

"King Varuna sees through all that is between 
heaven and earth and all that is beyond. He has 
counted the winkings of men's eyes." * 

But Varuna was too lofty and too unbribable to be 
popular; and Indra the fighter and soma-drinker, 
the ideal of the warrior class, outstripped him, only 
to yield in his turn, in popularity, to the priestly gods, 
Agni and Soma. 

Yet the leaders of religious thought became more 
and more dissatisfied with the plurality of divine 
powers. As the reason had sought for the one Agni 
back of the many fires, and the one Soma back of the 
many soma plants, so now it was urged on by an irre- 
sistible impulse to seek for the one God back of the 
many gods. This longing for a supreme, if not unit- 
ary, power to whom one might appeal is seen even 
in the earliest hymns, where to the deity addressed 
are attributed such power and splendor as only a 
supreme god might naturally be expected to possess ; 
and this peculiarity of the hymns, though perhaps 
hardly deserving of a special name, such as "heno- 
theism," is still significant of the fact that none of the 
gods were clearly outlined, and that the Indian mind 
laid more stress on the general divine nature of the 
deity and less on his particular personality. 

As a result of this dimness of outline in the con- 
ception of the gods, many of them tended to run to- 
gether. Thus many were classed in pairs, making 

1 A. v., IV, 16, 2, 4 , 5. 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN INDIA 83 

a new divinity, whose name was the compound of the 
two. Max Miiller specifies twelve such dual deities, 1 
the oldest of whom, Mitra-Varuna, goes back to pre- 
Vedic times. The gods are also, at times, identified 
with each other : Surya is Indra and Agni ; Agni 
is Varuna and Mitra, Indra, Aryaman, and Savitar. 
All the gods together are called the Visve Devas, the 
All-gods, and are worshiped as such, collectively. 

Whither all this was pointing must have been 
apparent to every thoughtful reader of the times. 
The gods were dissolving into each other and losing 
gradually what distinctness of personality they had 
possessed. The first step toward monism had been 
taken. 

In some passages of the Rik, pantheism is more 
distinctly hinted at. A late hymn of the First Book 
says : — 

"They call him Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni — to 
that which is but one they give many a title." 2 

The hymn to Varuna in the Artharva Veda, from 
which I quoted a few pages back, has the following 
remarkable verse : — ■ 

"Both this earth belongs to King Varuna, and 
also yonder broad sky whose boundaries are far 
away. Moreover, these two oceans are the loins of 
Varuna; yea, he is hidden in this small drop of 
water." 3 

1 "Origin and Growth of Religion," p. 280, note. 

2 R. V., I, 164, 46. 

3 A. V., IV, 16, 3. 



84 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

It was thus, we may suppose, being whispered 
about among the more philosophically minded that 
all the gods were at bottom one ; that even Varuna 
and Indra and Agni and Soma were but manifesta- 
tions of a fundamental unity which alone was real. 
It was a time of religious crisis ; the old foundations 
were giving way, and nothing very solid was as yet 
prepared to take their place. With the more ad- 
vanced thinkers the serene and simple faith of the 
olden times was no longer possible, and for them it 
was a day of doubt and of deep pondering. Some 
of the later hymns of the Rig Veda clearly show 
these tendencies. 

"Ye will not find Him who produced these creatures: an- 
other thing hath risen up among you. 

Enwrapt in misty cloud, with lips that stammer, hymn-chant- 
ers wander and are discontented." x 

"Who verily knows it and who can here declare it, whence it 
was born and whence comes this creation ? 

The gods are later than this world's production. Who knows 
then whence it first came into being ? 

He, the first origin of this creation, whether He formed it all 
or did not form it, 

Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, He verily 
knows it, — or perhaps He knows not." 2 

Some of the thinkers of this age may very well have 
seen in the signs of the times the speedy or at least 
certain decline and extinction of religion. Panthe- 
ism and a belief in a perfectly impersonal cosmos 

1 R. V., X, 82, 7. 2 R. V., X, 129, 6 and 7. 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN INDIA 85 

they would have accepted as the truth and the logi- 
cal and necessary outcome of Indian thought. The 
gods were dead, and soon the people must come to a 
recognition of this fact and to the acceptance of a 
pantheism that to all practical purposes was equiva- 
lent to atheism; and some of the philosophers, we 
may suppose, were quite ready to write books on the 
Non-Religion of the Future. 

If such philosophers there were, they were destined 
to disappointment. The people stuck to their poly- 
theistic religion, and those whom we may call the 
religious leaders, though following out the monistic 
speculation, clothed it in spiritual terms and clung 
to their faith. Faith, in fact, — so ardently did men 
in these dark days of doubt hold to it and long for it, 
— became itself a sort of deity. 

" Man winneth Faith by yearnings of the heart, and opulence 

by Faith, 
Faith in the early morning, Faith at noonday, will we invoke, 
Faith at the setting of the sun. O Faith, endow us with 

belief!" 1 

Unable to hold to their old polytheistic ideas and 
to their old gods, but clinging to their faith in some- 
thing divine, they searched for the one God in many 
directions. In a late hymn, which Max Miiller en- 
titles "To the Unknown God," the singer describes 
at length what the one God would be if he could but 
find Him; but each verse ends with the uncertain 

1 R.V.,X, 151, 4 and 5. 



86 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

query, "What God shall we adore with our obla- 
tion ?" 

" Giver of vital breath, of power and vigor, He whose com- 
mandments all the gods acknowledge ; 
The Lord of death whose shade is life immortal. What 

God shall we adore with our oblation? 
His, through His might, are these snow-covered mountains, 

and men call sea and Rasa His possessions : 
His arms are these, His are these heavenly regions. What 

God shall we adore with our oblation ? 
By Him the heaven is strong, the earth is steadfast, by Him 

light's realm and sky vault are supported : 
By Him the regions in mid-air were measured. What God 

shall we adore with our oblation ? 
He is the God of gods, and none beside Him. What God 

shall we adore with our oblation ? 
Lord of Life ! * Thou only comprehendest all these created 

things, and none beside Thee." 2 



'O u J 



All through the period of the later hymns and the 
earlier Brahmanas the search went on. Prajapati, 
Visvakarman, Brahmaspati, Purusha, — new gods 
from the priestly mould, in part monotheistic, in part 
pantheistic, — all were tried, but none gave complete 
satisfaction. Rest is not found until in the Upani- 
shads all gods and men and all things are merged in 
the Absolute — Brahman. 

The point of view most characteristic and most 
fundamental in the Upanishads is absolute idealism. 

1 "Prajapati." — Whether meant as a personal name, or used 
as a descriptive title of the unknown God, is not altogether clear. 
2 R. V., X, 121 ; 2,4,5,8, io. 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN INDIA 87 

The reason's fundamental demand for unity had 
gained its own fulfillment. Brahman, the Absolute, 
is the All-knower, and is identical with the knowing 
self of each individual. And the central thought of 
the Upanishads is that Brahman alone is real: all 
that exists is Brahman. With unwearying enumera- 
tion He — or shall I say It ? — is identified with all 
things. " Thou art woman, thou art man; thou art 
youth, thou art maiden ; thou art an old man totter- 
ing along on thy staff; thou art born with thy face 
turned everywhere. . . . Thou art the thunder-cloud, 
the seasons, the seas. Thou art without beginning, 
because thou art infinite ; thou from all worlds art 
born." * He is " smaller than the small and greater 
than the great." "Though sitting still He walks 
afar; though lying down He goes everywhere. . . . 
The wise, who knows the Self as bodiless within the 
bodies, as unchanging among changing things, as 
great and omnipresent, does not grieve." 2 "He rests 
and yet is restless ; distant, and yet so near ! Within 
all things is He present, and yet beyond all He 
extends." 3 

As the subject of knowledge He is himself entirely 
Unknowable — exactly as Kant's transcendental ego. 
In a sense we may attribute to Him existence, 
thought, and joy, but only negatively, as denying of 
Him empirical existence, objective existence, and the 

1 Svetasvatara, IV, 3 and 4. (Muller's translation). 

Katha, I, 2, 20, 21, 22. 
3 lea, 4-5. 



88 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

distinction of subject and object. 1 In Him subject 
and object are one and He is best known in dreamless 
sleep. We can describe Him only with the words 
"Netti, Netti," "No, No." " He is incomprehensible, 
for He cannot be comprehended ; He is imperish- 
able, for He cannot perish." 2 He is that which is 
"without sound, without touch, without form, with- 
out decay, without taste, without smell, without be- 
ginning, without end, beyond the Great, and un- 
changeable." 3 "By whom it is thought, by him it is 
not thought ; he by whom it is thought knows it not. 
It is not known by those who know it, known by 
those who know it not." 4 

"Whoever has found and understood the Self that 
has entered into this patched-together hiding place, 
he indeed is the creator, for he is the maker of every- 
thing, his is the world, for he is the world itself. 

"While we are here we may know this ; if not I am 
ignorant and there is great destruction. 

"If a man clearly beholds this Self as God, and as 
the lord of all that is and will be, then he is no more 
afraid. 

"He in whom the five beings and the ether rest, 
him alone I believe to be the Self, — I who know, 

1 See Deussen, " Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophic," Vol. 
II, pp. 1 17-134; and his "System des Vedanta," pp. 139-155. 

2 Brihad., IV, 4, 22. 

3 Katha, I, 3, 15. 

4 Ke. Up., II, 3. Cf. St. Augustine, "Deus melius scitur 
nesciendo." 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN INDIA 89 

believe him to be Brahman; I who am immortal, 
believe him to be immortal. 

"They who know the life of life, the eye of the eye, 
the ear of the ear, the mind of the mind, they have 
comprehended the ancient primeval Brahman. 

" By the mind alone is it to be perceived, there is no 
diversity. He who perceives therein any diversity 
goes from death to death. . . . 

"He therefore that knows it, after having become 
quiet, subdued, satisfied, patient, collected, sees Self 
in self, sees all as Self. Evil does not overcome him, 
he overcomes all evil. . . . 

"This great unborn Self, undecaying, undying, 
immortal, fearless, is indeed Brahman. Fearless is 
Brahman, and he who knows this becomes verily 
the fearless Brahman." 1 

The question naturally arises why the Indian reli- 
gion took the direction of absolute monism rather 
than of monotheism. The answer, I believe, is 
hardly to be found in climatic or geographic condi- 
tions, nor in the environment generally, but must be 
sought in the mental characteristics of the leaders of 
religious thought. As we have seen, the natural im- 
pulse of the reason is to construe all things in terms 
of an absolute unity, unless prevented by facts of 
which it is compelled to take cognizance. Now the 
religious leaders of India were characterized just 
by their indifference to, and almost scorn of, all 

1 Brihad., IV, 4, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 23, 25. 



90 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

facts that resisted the aims of pure thought. They 
were rationalists par excellence. If nature seemed 
inconsistent with the demands of the reason, so 
much the worse for nature : it was but illusion, 
Maya's veil, and gave no clew to ultimate reality. 
The true, behind the apparent, could be nothing but 
the all-inclusive Unity which reason demanded. 

Beside the apparently pluralistic character of 
nature, another fact but little regarded by the Indian 
mind was the existence of antitheses in the moral 
world. Metaphysics has always been of much more 
importance in India than ethics; the universe is 
thought under the category of being rather than in 
terms of obligation. This is well illustrated in the 
characters of the Vedic gods. With the exception 
of Varuna and Mitra there is not one who is distin- 
guished for righteousness; and it was the fate of 
Varuna and Mitra to yield early to the easy-going and 
passionate Indra, whose goodness consisted chiefly 
in giving rain and cattle to those who supplied him 
with butter and soma, and who throughout the Veda 
prizes the burnt offering far higher than the contrite 
heart. If we leave out of consideration Buddhism 
and some of the minor sects, we may say that for 
India the great line of cleavage in the universe has 
always run between the real and the unreal, rather 
than between the right and the wrong ; and it is just 
this lack of interest in the moral question, this indis- 
position to divide the world into two great warring 
camps of the good and the evil, as did the Persians, 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN INDIA 9 1 

that has led the Indian to the conception of an 
absolutely monistic God, who should include within 
Himself the evil as well as the good, the just no more 
than the unjust, who should in fact be indifferent to 
both, and "jenseits von gut und bose" 

This monistic conception, uninfluenced by em- 
pirical or moral considerations, was, then, the natural 
result of giving free reign to the demand of the rea- 
son; and had the Upanishads been philosophical 
treatises only, this conception — which is certainly 
the ruling one — would have been the only one as 
well. But the Upanishads are not chiefly systems of 
philosophy, and the concept of Brahman, while 
scarcely influenced by empirical and moral data, was 
due, not entirely to logical thought, but in large part 
also to the religious feelings and demands. Thought 
and feeling I have had to separate for purposes of 
exposition, but such separation, it must be remem- 
bered, is artificial and untrue. In many of the Upani- 
shads the yearning of the religious soul had almost 
as much to do in forming the concept of Brahman 
as had the logical intellect. It was the religious 
thought that wrote most of the Upanishads. 

This religious thought was not systematic, and 
Brahman is therefore viewed in different ways. At 
times the universe is described pantheistically, Brah- 
man and the world being identified ; at times all be- 
side Brahman as the knowing subject is regarded as 
pure illusion — appearance, not reality. In still 
other passages neither the pantheistic nor the abso- 



92 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

lute idealistic view satisfies the religious demands of 
the writer, and Brahman becomes the personal God, 
the Creator and Sustainer and Soul of the World. 
This new direction seems to have been largely, 
though perhaps unconsciously, determined by feel- 
ing. In the writers of the later Upanishads the 
mystic experience seems to have been more dominant 
than in the earlier ones ; it is in them that we find 
expressed the most intense mystic bliss ; * and it is in 
them also that the transition from the more abstract 
to the more personal concept of Brahman is most 
often met with. It seems probable that the experi- 
ence was in large degree responsible for the belief, 
though doubtless the belief also had much influence 
on the experience. The theistic outcome of the later 
Upanishads seems largely a product of the Religion 
of Feeling. 

Most characteristic of India is it that throughout 
all this period of monistic speculation, polytheism 
kept the even tenor of her way just as if nothing had 
happened. Says Barth, in his "Religions of India," 
" The coexistence of things which to us seem to con- 
tradict and exclude each other is exactly the history 
of India, and that radical formula which occurs even 
in the hymns, that the gods are only a single being 
under different names, is one of those which is often- 

1 The bliss of the earlier Upanishads is often not conscious 
bliss, but deep, absolutely unconscious sleep. See Deussen's " All- 
gemeine Geschichte der Philosophic," Vol. II, pp. 131 and 132; 
also his "System des Vedanta," pp. 197-202. 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN INDIA 93 

est on her lips, and whicli yet, up to the present time, 
she has never succeeded in rightly believing." To 
the philosophers polytheism still had a certain grade 
— though a low grade — of truth, while to the com- 
mon people it was just as true as ever. And if we 
abstract from the philosophers, the majority of 
whom from the times of the Upanishads down to our 
own have professed the absolute idealism of the 
Vedanta, we may say that the religion of the people 
as a whole has always been polytheism, with more or 
less of a recognition in the back of their minds that 
the gods somehow or other were really One, and that 
if one ever became a philosopher one would see it 
that way. 

Nor were they without reasons for their polythe- 
istic belief. Had not their fathers and their wise 
ancestors believed in many gods ? Did not almost 
every one so believe ? And had not they themselves 
so believed all their lives? Among all peoples — 
and the Indians are no exceptions — authority and 
habit have always been two most important founda- 
tions of faith. Moreover, if they regarded nature 
and the experiences of life, they saw multiplicity and 
a world of apparently many powers. It was only 
among the philosophers that reason's demand for 
unity was strong enough to overcome all these things. 
To the simple mind which asks only a few questions 
and seeks explanation only a little way, polytheism 
is the obvious answer to most cosmic problems. Nor 
are we to suppose that this clinging to the old gods 



94 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

was uninfluenced by the feelings and the will. The 
religious soul longs for sympathy and often demands 
a god who shall be so personal as to be very finite. 
Hence the importance in Hinduism of Krishna and 
Rama and the other divine avatars. In religious 
concepts thought and feeling are so inextricably 
interwoven that it is impossible to trace the influ- 
ence of the one without becoming involved in the 
other. 

Before leaving the Religion of the Understanding 
in India, I must treat very briefly of Buddhism, for it 
is a specially good example of the product of pure 
thought in religion. To trace its origin we must go 
back again to the Upanishads. Some of these writ- 
ings, as I pointed out above, were largely influenced 
by feeling, and as a result tended to make the abso- 
lute Brahman into a monotheistic God. But there 
is another tendency in the Upanishads, traces of 
which are found especially in the less emotional and 
more coldly intellectual portions. This tendency 
is away from absolute idealism toward materialistic 
pantheism. Brahman is all — that is to say, All is 
Brahman, or all is one. There is no Brahman out- 
side of the world, of course, and the name Brah- 
man, no longer supported by any emotional expe- 
rience, is retained to mean the world only as a relic 
of the past. Materialistic pantheism in its strict 
sense naturally and logically leads to atheism — it is 
already atheism put in polite terms. If the material- 
istic pantheist be not a mystic, he is bound by his own 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN INDIA 95 

logic to deny anything like what is ordinarily meant 
by a God. To deny the God of idealism and still 
to affirm that God is everything, is exactly equivalent 
to affirming that He is nothing. The only difference 
between materialistic pantheism and atheism is an 
emotional tinge which the former sometimes pos- 
sesses, and which in it is essentially incongruous and 
out of place. 

The logical outcome of the less emotional panthe- 
istic Upanishads was, therefore, the atheistic Samkhya 
philosophy. And from the Samkhya (through its 
off-shoot, the Yoga) sprang Buddhism. 

The Samkhya was essentially philosophy, not reli- 
gion. It taught, to be sure, a way of escape from 
those evils which it recognized ; but this escape was 
a matter of knowledge — a sort of science. Its 
purely intellectual character was not a thing for 
people to live by and hence brought no satisfaction 
to the masses. Was it possible to make the atheistic 
Samkhya into a religion ? This was Buddha's prob- 
lem. Like Kapilla, the author of the Samkhya, he 
sought no help from any god ; man must work out 
his own salvation. And this was to be done not only 
by a realization of the truth of things, but also by 
the practice of real virtue and through enthusiasm for 
an ideal of life to which one might attain on earth. 
This, with the inspiration which came from the mag- 
netic personality of the Master, gave to Buddhism 
that emotional quality which has stamped it a reli- 
gion rather than a philosophy, and which has been 



96 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

responsible for its great success. Its logic was con- 
sistent enough; but its atheistic character proved 
to be no more satisfactory to the human heart than 
was the philosophy of Kapilla ; and if this be an es- 
sential of Buddhism, we may say that there have been 
but very few Buddhists in all history. Not many 
have felt themselves strong enough for such a doc- 
trine. The yearning for supernatural help and super- 
natural companionship has been one of the most 
striking and universal characteristics of the race; 
and the deification of the atheistic Buddha himself in 
every land where Buddhism has been preached is a 
striking commentary on human nature and on the 
futility of an atheistic religion. 

The unsatisfactory character of atheistic Buddhism 
and of pantheistic Brahmanism when untouched by 
emotion, and their inability to become real religions, 
illustrates the insufficiency of the reason as the sole 
basis for religious belief. Both strict Buddhism and 
absolute and unemotional idealism are much more 
logical and make much stronger appeal to pure 
thought than many a popular faith; yet one thing 
they lack. And as the Religion of Primitive Cre- 
dulity had to give way before the Religion of the 
Understanding, so we now see the latter unable 
to satisfy the demands of human nature and turn- 
ing for assistance to the Religion of Feeling. 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN INDIA 97 

III 

In the Shamanism and possession of early races 
we saw one of the earliest stages of the belief that 
man may come into immediate contact with super- 
human spirits. Among almost every savage people 
there are individuals who, by certain processes, can 
work themselves into an ecstatic condition which to 
them primarily, and secondarily to the beholders, 
means possession by the god. That this phenomenon 
was not unknown to the early Indians has been shown 
to be most probable by Oldenberg in his "Religion 
des Veda." Not only does it seem likely from a 
priori considerations, but certain ceremonies have 
been pointed out by Oldenberg which seem exactly 
on a par with methods used by other early peoples to 
bring about the ecstatic state. Thus in the Diksha 
ceremony of preparation for the Soma offering, one 
must be bathed and suitably clad and with head 
swathed must sit near the offering fire in perfect 
silence till sunset ; at that time one must drink of the 
sacred milk and then watch through the night, observ- 
ing certain other requirements, such as speaking with 
a stammering tongue, keeping the last three fingers 
closed in one's fist, etc. Sometimes this preparatory 
ceremony lasts till complete bodily exhaustion. How 
closely this resembles the sweat baths, fasting, and self- 
inflicted pains of many sorts, used the world over by 
savage tribes to bring about esctasy and possession, 
will be evident to all. "Fasting and exhaustion," 



98 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

says Oldenberg, "are among the chief characteris- 
tics of the Diksha; the element of ecstatic rapture 
has left at least one trace, if I am not mistaken — 
namely, in the stammering speech of those offici- 
ating." * 

This Diksha is also called a "Tapas" — the 
word used to mean ascetic practices, and the ecstatic 
condition aroused thereby. This notion of the ac- 
quiring of supernatural power and illumination 
through self-inflicted pains meets us throughout the 
Yajur and Atharva Vedas and in the Brahmanas. 
The Yajur Veda recognizes certain forms of pos- 
session by good and evil spirits, and while the poets 
of the Rik are, as a rule, interested only in the more 
sober side of the cult, there is at least one hymn 
which shows us the wild form of possession in which 
the " Munis" (i.e. ascetics in a state of ecstasy), are 
described as acting much as the shamans of Siberia. 

" The Munis, girdled with the wind, wear garments soiled of 

yellow hue. 
They following the wind's swift course go where the gods 

have gone before. 
Transported with our Munihood we have pressed on into the 

winds : 
You therefore, mortal men, behold our natural bodies and no 

more. 
The Muni, made associate in the holy work of every god, 
Looking upon all varied forms, flies through the region of the 

air." 2 

1 p. 402. * X, 136, 2-4. 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN INDIA 99 

Alongside of this wild form of ecstasy there was 
growing up in Vedic times a new sort of religious feel- 
ing. To be sure, the attitude of the worshiper most 
often depicted in the hymns is of a purely commercial 
character and is epitomized by the expression, "Here 
is butter, give us cows." But we should be doing 
the ancient Indians injustice were we to suppose that 
their attitude toward their gods was entirely one of do 
ut des. The hymns, indeed, being written chiefly for 
ritualistic purposes, are not the fitting medium for the 
expression of purely personal emotion, but even in 
the hymns are to be found traces of a feeling of deep 
longing for at least the approval in a personal way 
of the god to whom the singer addressed his prayer. 
How old such a feeling was we cannot say: it may 
have originated during Vedic times or it may reach 
far back into the Aryan past ; but whenever it arose, 
its birth marked a turning point in the history of reli- 
gion. There was no raving ecstasy on the one hand, 
nor on the other hand was the gift of the god sought 
and the gift only. The god himself, or at least his 
personal approval, was longed for. Listen to this 
hymn to Varuna : — 

" Yearning for the wide -seeing one, my thoughts move on- 
ward unto him. . . . 
Once more together let us speak. 

Varuna, hear this call of mine, be gracious unto us this day, 
Longing for help I cried to thee." 1 

1 R. V., I, 25, 16, 17, 19. Cf. also VII, 86, 2, and 88, 3-6, for 

somewhat similar expressions toward Varuna. 

M W v, 



IOO THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

This is a very different sort of thing from the naive 
hymns to Surya and the Dawn, or the businesslike 
petitions to Indra; there is real religious feeling 
here, a longing, though but faint, for a closer intimacy 
with the divine. In religion it is generally true that 
longing creates its own satisfaction ; and so it proved 
in this case. It was but a step — though a long one 
— from the "yearning for the wide-seeing one" to 
the mystic satisfaction in union with Brahman. 

The growth of the mystic germ in India is hidden 
from us. The hymns, written as most of them were 
by professional singers for ritualistic use at sac- 
rifices, were ill-fitted to convey mystic feeling, and 
the liturgical Brahmanas were still more unsuitable. 
Hence we may suppose a gradual growth of the Reli- 
gion of Feeling throughout the early period, and shall 
not be surprised when it breaks upon us, full-blown, 
in the Upanishads. 

If the Upanishads be considered on their intellec- 
tual side only, they are full of contradictions. They 
disagree on nearly every point. Some, as pointed 
out in the last chapter, are idealistic, some panthe- 
istic, some theistic, some even tend toward material- 
ism; in some Brahman is the Absolute, in others 
he is a personal and finite god. But from the stand- 
point of feeling the Upanishads are at one. "It is 
not a new philosophy, it is a new religion, that the 
Upanishads offer. This is no religion of rites and 
ceremonies — it is a religion for suffering humanity. 
It is a religion that comforts the afflicted and gives 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN INDIA IOI 

to the soul 'that peace which the world cannot 
give.' " * That the Upanishads have a philosophical 
side no one can deny, but the message in which they 
all unite is religious rather than philosophical ; it is 
a matter of feeling even more than of thought. And 
that message is the unity — apprehended by im- 
mediate intuition — of the individual soul with the 
Soul of all things. 

"That which is the subtile essence, in it all that 
exists has its self. It is the True. It is the Self. 
And, O Svetaketu, that art thou." 2 

"The ocean transformed through the action of 
clouds, into the form of rivers, etc., ceases to be itself ; 
so indeed hast thou forgotten thyself through the 
power of conditions. O friend ! remember thy full 
self. Thou art Brahman, the ground of existence, 
the All." 3 

This immediate consciousness of identity with the 
Eternal is an experience whose joy and blessedness 
surpass all that the world can give; it is an emo- 
tional state of great intensity. 

"A particle of Its bliss supplies the bliss of the 
whole universe, everything becomes enlightened in 
Its light ; nay all else appears worthless after a sight 
of that essence; I am indeed this supreme eternal 
Brahman." 4 

"The One, omnipotent inner self of all beings 
manifests Himself as the manifold ; none but those 

1 Hopkins, p. 230. 3 Svaraj'yasiddhi. 

2 Chand., VI, 13, 3. * Vijnanananka. 



102 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

who see Him in themselves find eternal hap- 
piness." * 

"The bliss of Brahman! — speech and mind fall 
back baffled and ashamed ; all fear vanishes in the 
knowing of that bliss." 2 

"Through knowing Him who is more subtile 
than subtile, who is creator of everything, who has 
many forms, who embraces everything, the Blessed 
Lord — one attains peace without end." 3 

"There is one ruler, the Self, within all things, who 
makes the one form manifold. The wise who per- 
ceive Him within themselves, to them belongs eternal 
happiness, not to others. There is one eternal 
thinker, thinking non-eternal thoughts, who, though 
one, fulfills the desires of many. The wise who per- 
ceive Him within themselves, to them belongs eternal 
peace, not to others. They perceive that highest in- 
describable, saying, This is that. How then can I 
understand it ? Has it its own light or does it reflect 
light ? The sun does not shine there, nor the moon 
and the stars, nor these lightnings, and much less 
this fire. When He shines, everything shines after 
Him; by His light all this is lighted." 4 

But this mystic union or identity with Brahman 
and its ineffable joy is not to be gained by mere intel- 
lectual assent to a proposition. One who by argu- 
ments solely had been led to accept the doctrine of 
the Upanishads and who stopped where the argu- 

1 Katha. 3 Cvet, 4, 14. 

2 Taittiriya. 4 Katha, II, 5, 12-15. 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN INDIA 103 

ment stopped, might be a solipsist or a pantheist, 
but could never understand the real spirit of the 
Upanishads. It is not so much a question of the 
understanding as of the heart. Says the Bhaga- 
vadgita, "Every one derives his faith from the in- 
most tendency of his heart ; the man is all faith, he is 
that which he has faith in." It is an emotional ex- 
perience rather than a syllogism that lies at the basis 
of the one great common faith of the Upanishads. 
When discussing matters of the understanding, they 
often disagree with each other in many points that 
seem essentials, and even contradict themselves; 
but when it is a question of the vital emotional expe- 
rience of mystic and blissful union with the spirit of 
the Cosmos, they are at one. 

This experience, being emotional rather than logi- 
cal, like the Tao of Lao-tse, cannot be taught. It 
cometh not forth save by fasting and prayer. It 
must be sought after and cultivated. How to find 
and realize it becomes the great practical question of 
the sages. For this many devices — all more or less 
alike — are used. Books are useful at the first 
stage, as are the words of a teacher. Yet these of 
themselves are only propaedeutics, and can never 
give the self-realization of Brahman. The "firm 
holding back of the senses" and the repression of 
desire are more adequate means. In later times 
definite rules of ascetic practices, of managing the 
breath, of contemplation, were laid down, by which 
one might attain to the condition desired. Similar 



104 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

rules were especially elaborated by the Yogins, who 
sought, not the state of union with Brahman above 
described, but rather the disunion of the (individual) 
self from the body. 1 The methods followed by all 
the mystics were in principle the same. Two things 
were sought by them: (i) the narrowing and the 
unification of consciousness, (2) the intensification of 
a single central emotion. The ordinary life of many 
discordant aims and many distracting thoughts and 
experiences and of constant change was felt to be un- 
worthy and unsatisfying, and the mystic sought to 
unify his conscious life and give it some sort of per- 
manence by crystallizing it about one central ideal 
of supreme worth. The method of gaining this end 
was, first, by means of ascetic practices of various 
kinds to weaken the bodily impulses and to destroy 
all interest in the natural bodily pleasures which 
ordinarily captivate the attention and distract the 
thought. This process must be carried on for a long 
time before the attempt is made to reach the ecstatic 
condition. When at length the body is completely 
conquered, another series of processes, both physical 
and mental, having the same general aim, must be 
gone through as an immediate preparation for the 
mystic state. All this is minutely described in some 
of the later Upanishads and the Yoga Sutras. One 
must seat himself in a quiet place and in such a posi- 
tion that neither bodily pain nor bodily pleasure shall 

1 Cf. Garbe, " Samkhya und Yoga," p. 50. 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN INDIA 105 

distract his attention. The stream of consciousness 
must be narrowed by fixating the sight upon a single 
point — as, for instance, upon the navel — or by 
repeating endlessly the syllable Om. Gradually 
all consciousness of the body disappears. 1 The ob- 
ject chosen for contemplation — be it Brahman, or 
the freedom of the atman or soul — now gradually 
fills the conscious field to the exclusion of all else ; 
the whole life is unified by it ; the constantly changing 
character of the stream gives place to the comparative 
permanence of this one idea ; and the great mass of 
vague feeling crystallizes about it, and streams away 
from it, like a halo round the head of a saint. The 
one emotion, occupying thus the whole conscious- 
ness, swells to enormous proportions, and becomes 
identical with all reality. The self is entirely for- 
gotten and lost in the glory of the one emotional 
experience. 

" As the bird breaking its bonds 
Fearless soars into the air, 
So the soul breaking its bonds 
Escapes the chains of Samsara. 

" As the flame, burning awhile, 
Sinks at last to nothingness, 
So the soul, its works consumed, 
Sinks at last to nothingness." 2 

1 Cf. the Kschurika Up., verses 1-8, where the various parts of 
the body, from the toes up, are described as gradually sinking 
out of consciousness — an excellent piece of introspection. 

2 Kschurika Up., 22 and 23. From Deussen's German trans- 
lation. 



106 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

" To nothingness ; " for the self is entirely forgotten, 
and the ecstatic condition, if prolonged, results in 
complete unconsciousness. It is a clear case of self- 
hypnotization. 

This general description applies, as I said above, 
to the trances of all the Indian mystics. As the char- 
acter of an emotion, however, is very largely deter- 
mined by the ideational core around which it centers, 
it cannot be supposed that the emotional state 
attained by the Yogin, though induced by similar 
external means, was identical with that of the pan- 
theistic and theistic mystics who sought union with 
the One. There is, however, sufficient similarity to be 
of some psychological interest. The emotion of the 
Yogin is often one of great peace, though it does not 
seem to be of so intense and blissful a nature as that 
described in my quotations from the Upanishads. 
The physical means used to bring about the two 
states, and so far as we can see the bodily processes 
accompanying the two, were practically the same. In 
both there was a deadening of the senses, a narrow- 
ing of the field of consciousness, which approximated 
to the hypnotic condition, a tense concentration upon 
a single idea. The difference in the resulting 
emotions seems to have been due entirely to the 
ideational content around which the feeling elements 
centered — in one case the thought of union or identity 
with the personal or impersonal Brahman, in the 
other the idea of freedom from the bonds of the flesh. 
The resulting emotion, moreover, was differently 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN INDIA 107 

interpreted. To each it was the fulfillment of his de- 
sire. The mystic felt himself united with Brahman ; 
the Yogin knew that he became free from the body. 

There is another difference between the two which 
must be noted : in general and in the long run, Yoga 
tended more toward the abnormal and fantastic, 
the orthodox mysticism more toward the calmly 
religious and spiritual. The true successors of the 
early Yogins are to-day the Sadhus and Fakirs; 
while the mystics of the Upanishads have their pres- 
ent representatives in the Vedanta philosophers, 
whose feeling experience is akin to "cosmic emotion" 
rather than to the abnormal states of the Yogin. 

Yoga, in short, is not so much the successor of 
Upanishad mysticism as of the old Vedic Tapas. 
The primitive notions of ecstasy gained through as- 
ceticism, modified somewhat by the ritualistic ideas 
of Brahmanic times, developed in an unbroken 
growth into the beliefs and practices of the Yogins. 

The mysticism of the Upanishads differs from the 
repulsive phenomenon of possession, in its cruder 
forms, as day from night. The latter is a state of 
diseased excitability ; the former is — or at least 
may be — completely normal and calm. It is for the 
mystic a quiet and uplifting joy in which one may 
take refuge from the miseries of the world. It gives 
him a vantage ground from which he may defy the 
attacks of fortune and upon which he may feel him- 
self superior to all the chances of the phenomenal 
world. "The wise, finding sweet rest in the supreme 



108 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

Essence, continue forever to enjoy it within, though 
going in the ways of the world without." * There is 
no trace here of hysteria or insanity, nor of the fan- 
tastic and revolting performances of the shaman and 
the medicine man. Yet we must remember that the 
two agree in springing, not from the senses nor from 
the understanding, but from that vast background 
of feeling so intimately connected with the life 
functions of the organism, and large enough to send 
forth evil and ugly products as well as good and beau- 
tiful ones. It is noticeable also that, so far as we 
have gone, the productions of this field bear upon 
them a mark of certainty that neither the senses nor 
the understanding are able to give the beliefs which 
they produce. The tree and the sun are given up 
for gods of a more intellectual nature ; the worshiper 
of Indra, the god of the understanding, needs at 
times to prop his weak faith as best he may, or 
even doubts the existence of his god ; but he who has 
once been possessed by spirits, evil or good, and he 
who has experienced the union of his self with -Brah- 
man, can no more doubt the reality of spirits or of 
The Spirit than he can doubt his own existence. 

1 Panchadasi. 



CHAPTER V 

RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN ISRAEL 

I have chosen the religion of Israel as one of the 
objects of our study, both because of its immense in- 
fluence upon modern Christian beliefs, and also be- 
cause of its marked contrast to the religions of India. 
It would be hard to find two great religions more 
fundamentally different than are those of the Hindus 
and the Hebrews ; and yet with all their contrast we 
shall find in the latter the same three phases of belief 
working themselves out in much the same way as 
in the former. 



As to the Religion of Primitive Credulity, there 
is even less that needs here to be said than was the 
case when dealing with India. The immense force 
of tradition and authority, and the great weight of 
tribal customs in the earlier days, and of the Law 
in the later days of Hebrew history, these are matters 
of common knowledge and need only be mentioned to 
bring to the reader's mind the great role played by 
unquestioning and obedient acceptance of the pre- 
sented in the religion of the devout Jew. Unhesitat- 
ing credence for the teachings of the Past was in the 

109 



110 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

air; it was inhaled, so to speak, by the individual 
at every breath, and was so decidedly a characteristic 
of the race that Israel was one of the first peoples in 
history to collect and solidify the teachings of its 
Past into a sacred Canon. The books which went 
to make up this collection were so holy as to " defile 
the hands" — as do all things pertaining to the 
divine in early days — and so far beyond ques- 
tion or possibility of error that every syllable or letter 
of them must be handed down without the slightest 
alteration. This almost fetishistic view of the Scrip- 
tures which is found in the later days of the Hebrew 
race betokens indeed a somewhat complex psychologi- 
cal attitude, and involves self-conscious reasoning and 
deliberate argument quite as much as childlike ac- 
ceptance of the given. It is far from being naive; 
and yet it is obvious that primitive credulity plays an 
important part in it, and is one of the conditions that 
make it possible. 

The respect for the Canon is one of the later prod- 
ucts of the Hebrew religion, and primitive credulity 
of course had an important influence long before there 
was anything like a formulated Canon. It is mani- 
fest, as I have suggested, in the maintenance of tribal 
religious customs and the acceptance of ancestral 
beliefs from the earliest days. Nor is the sensuous 
correlate which we have found in other religions 
absent amongst the Israelites ; for though, so far as 
we know, they never fancied that they saw their god, 
as the savage sees his tree or river god, or as the 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN ISRAEL III 

Hindu saw Ushas or Surya, they felt the same yearn- 
ing for the assurance of their senses as to the presence 
of the divine that is found among all early peoples. 
Hence the value of the many material objects used 
in his worship that were supposed to have a myste- 
rious connection with the deity. The holy places of 
Palestine, the messeba, the ashera, the fetichistic 
stone in the Ark, the ephod, and the many images 
of Yahweh in the form of a bull or serpent, — all 
these things point to the need felt by the early Is- 
raelites for some sensuous means of strengthening 
their unreasoned and traditional faith. 

That these objects were a great aid to devout 
worship there can be no doubt. At an age when 
abstraction is rare and religious sentiment has 
hardly yet been born, and when men think chiefly 
in concrete terms and deal only with the particular, 
religion must appeal directly to the senses or lose 
most of its hold over the imagination and the will. 
But as the intellect develops and thought occupies 
a constantly more important place in life, these sensu- 
ous props become less needful, and man who has 
climbed by means of them, 

" unto the ladder turns his back, 
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees 
By which he did ascend." 

Thus it was in Israel. When the images were no 
longer needful for faith, the prophets and more ad- 
vanced minds cried out against their use, and rightly ; 



112 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

for, lingering after they had ceased to be useful, they 
had become a clog to progress and delayed the further 
development of religious thought and feeling. The 
lower classes, the ultra-conservatives, who considered 
themselves the truly orthodox, clung, indeed, to the 
use of images as one of the sacred customs handed 
down by the Fathers ; but in the course of time the 
prophets and their followers succeeded in branding 
the worship of visible objects as disloyalty to Yah- 
weh and as the cause of his fierce anger. In fact, 
they even persuaded the people that the righteous 
Fathers never had approved of it. Jacob is depicted 
as destroying the teraphim of all his people ; and Yah- 
weh himself, at the very beginning of the desert wan- 
dering, according to the Deuteronomist, declared 
as one of the fundamental laws of Israel: "Thou 
shalt not make unto thee any graven image, nor any 
likeness of anything that is in the heavens above, nor 
in the earth beneath, nor in the waters under the earth. 
Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them nor serve 
them." 

It was not, however, till the days of the second 
Isaiah that image worship was so outgrown as to be 
the object, not of denunciation, but of ridicule. In a 
brilliant passage — Is. 44 M ~~ 17 — the prophet iden- 
tifies the gods of the Gentiles with their idols, and sets 
forth the absurdity of idolatry with the pen of a great 
satirist. The image worshiper "heweth him down 
cedars, and taketh the holm-tree and the oak, and 
strengtheneth for himself one among the trees of the 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN ISRAEL II3 

forest : he planteth a fir-tree and the rain doth nour- 
ish it. Then shall it be for a man to burn ; and he 
taketh thereof, and warmeth himself ; yea, he kindleth 
it, and baketh bread ; yea, he maketh a god, and wor- 
shipeth it ; he maketh it a graven image, and falleth 
down thereto. He burnetii part thereof in the fire, 
with part thereof he eateth flesh; he roasteth roast 
and is satisfied ; yea, he warmeth himself, and saith, 
Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire. And the residue 
thereof he maketh a god, even a graven image; he 
falleth down unto it and worshipeth, and prayeth 
unto it, and saith, Deliver me, for thou art my god." * 
In the author of this splendid satire we see the 
incarnation of the Reason overthrowing the tendency 
of primitive credulity to worship the visible and tan- 
gible. But long before these words were written, 
Thought had gained for itself a commanding posi- 
tion and had come to wield an immense influence over 
both the content and the form of religious belief. 

II 

As in India, so in Israel, the application of thought 
to religion resulted in a turning away from polythe- 
ism. With the Hebrews, as with the Hindus, the 
story of the Religion of the Understanding is the story 
of the growth of monotheism. Yet the moving force 
and the final goal of Hebrew thought are very differ- 
ent from those we found in India. 

1 Cf. also Is. 40 19 ' 20 , 41 6 ' 7 , 46 6 - 7 , Jer. io 3 " 6 , Hab. 2 18 , Ps. 115 4 - 8 . 

1 



114 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

That the Israelites, when first met with in history, 
believed in many gods goes without saying. Yahweh 
was indeed their own national god, but they recog- 
nized the gods of the other nations as just as real as 
he. Neither were they strictly monolatrous, but, 
besides worshiping their teraphim or family gods, 
they saw nothing wrong in adopting for certain pur- 
poses the cult of foreign deities, as the agricultural 
Baals of Canaan. The story of their development 
from this crude form of faith up to ethical mono- 
theism is in large part the story of Hebrew thought. 

The two great elements in this development were 
the historical experience of the nation and the reflec- 
tion of thoughtful individuals and of the people at 
large upon that experience. In no other nation is the 
immediate influence of the events of its history upon 
the growth of its concepts so clear. Both the ele- 
ments mentioned were essential. Truly Israel was a 
peculiar people and its history was a peculiar history. 

If I may be allowed the expression, the Hebrews 
were reflective but not philosophic. They were a 
thoughtful people, but their thought was in concrete 
and particular terms. The demand for unity and 
for a single explanation of all things, so characteristic 
of the Hindus, was theirs in but a slight degree. It 
was rather the particular facts of their experience that 
held their attention and determined their final 
Weltanschauung. Moreover, it was not metaphysics, 
but human history, that occupied their thoughts. The 
ultimate constitution of Reality did not particularly 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN ISRAEL 115 

interest them, but the immediate facts of life were 
always pressing for explanation. The Hebrews 
were a practical and an earnest people ; for theoreti- 
cal, cosmical questions they had little care ; but the 
interpretation to be given to the facts of national life 
were not theoretical, but terribly real, and how one 
should classify and explain these facts might well 
make all the difference between life and death. 
Hence all their best thought was centered, not upon 
ontology, but on the philosophy of history. 

Another racial characteristic which tends in some 
measure to explain the course taken by their thought 
is a certain pride of race and sense of uniqueness, 
common, indeed, in some measure to all peoples, 
but developed to an unusual degree in the Hebrews. 
Given such a race feeling, and given such a series 
of historical events in the early part of their history 
as will lead them to the belief that the thing which 
most of all differentiates them from other and inferior 
races is their religion, and it is easy to see that they 
will be likely to stick to it through thick and thin, 
to emphasize constantly more and more its impor- 
tance, and finally to regard it as the only true religion 
and their god as the only true God. 

The early history of the Israelites gave them, in 
fact, just this sense of the great importance of their 
religion, and of the peculiar relation in which they 
stood to their god. This relation was one funda- 
mentally of gratitude. It was Yahweh, so their tra- 
dition told them, who of his own great mercy had 



Il6 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

chosen Israel, having pity upon her because of her per- 
secutions in the land of Egypt ; it was Yahweh who, 
with a mighty hand and with an outstretched arm, 
had delivered her from the power of Pharaoh and 
led her through the perils of sea and desert into 
the Promised Land; and it was he again who had 
subdued her enemies before her. No other nation 
had so many things for which to thank her god. 
Moreover, this Yahweh was from the first a god who 
loved righteousness — that is, tribal righteousness — ■ 
and hated iniquity. There never was a time, so far 
as we know, when he did not embody the highest of 
his people's moral ideals — for had he not of his own 
good grace done for them everything that they could 
ask? Hence when first settled in Canaan, we find 
the Israelites already assured from their own past 
experience of the greatness and goodness of their god. 
The Canaanite and Philistine wars taught the same 
lesson, for it was the Yahweh religion alone which 
united the scattered tribes to oppose a common 
front to the foe, it was his servants the prophets that 
roused the people to resistance, it was in his name that 
they fought; "the sword of Yahweh" was their bat- 
tle-cry. Hence it was felt, and rightly felt, that it 
was not Israel that had saved Yahweh, but 
Yahweh that had saved Israel. It was the logical 
conclusion from the premises; for had it not been 
for its religion, the nation would have been early 
swallowed up and absorbed by the surrounding Gen- 
tiles. From these wars, therefore, the Hebrews 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN ISRAEL 117 

emerged with greater confidence in the power of their 
god and greater gratitude to him than ever before; 
for the hero of the struggle for national existence had 
been, not Barak nor Gideon nor Saul nor David, but 
Yahweh. One of their ancient histories was en- 
titled "The Book of the Wars of Yahweh"; and 
Deborah sings of the defeat of Sisera : — 

" Yahweh, when thou wentest forth out of Seir, 
When thou marchedst out of the field of Edom, 
The earth trembled, the heavens also dropped, 
Yea, the clouds dropped water. 
The mountains quaked at the presence of Yahweh, 
Even yon Sinai at the presence of Yahweh, the God of 
Israel." 1 

As the twelve scattered tribes drew together under 
Saul and David, the nation gained in importance in the 
minds of men, and with it the national god. Stand- 
ing, as he did, moreover, as the representative and 
protector of the centralized government, he became 
more than formerly identified with the idea of law. 
As a general thing in the ancient world, political 
centralization meant religious centralization, and the 
god of the king came to stand for the ideal of all that 
was best in the kingdom. 

Of course, in saying this I do not mean that the 
concept of Yahweh was ideally moral in the modern 
sense. Like other tribal gods, he was more or less 
ruled by whims ; his action was by no means always 

1 Jud. 5 4 ' 5 . 



Il8 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

guided by moral considerations. As Wellhausen 
puts it, he had unaccountable moods. He is often 
angry without reason and repents merely because his 
wrath is cooled. Sometimes his action is regarded as 
wanton, as in i Sam. 26 19 , where David, though con- 
scious of his own innocence, thinks it quite probable 
that it is Yahweh who has stirred up Saul against 
him; and in 2 Sam. 24 we find him moving David 
to number the people and then punishing him for so 
doing by sending pestilence upon the land. The holi- 
ness of the primitive Yahweh, moreover, was more 
like electricity than like saintliness — a sort of physi- 
cal effulgence that made too close approach to him 
dangerous and even fatal. It was not without good 
cause that the people exclaimed to Moses, "Let not 
God speak unto us lest we die." When the ark of 
Yahweh, having carried pestilence with it through 
all the Philistine country, was sent back by the five 
lords of the Philistines into Yahweh's land and came 
to a halt at Beth-shemesh, fifty thousand of the in- 
habitants came to their death by looking into it. 
"And the men of Beth-shemesh said, Who is able 
to stand before this holy Lord God?" 1 And when, 
in the next generation, David brought the ark up 
toward Jerusalem, the same mysterious, half -physical 
power brought instant death to Uzzah, who had inno- 
cently put forth his hand to steady the ark as it 
seemed about to fall from the cart. This unac- 
countable and terrible danger from the dread presence 
1 1 Sam. 6 19 - 20 . 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN ISRAEL 1 19 

of Yahweh made David fear to have the ark with 
him, so he had it placed in the house of Obed-Edom ; 
where it wrought as mysterious and unreasonable a 
blessing as it had wrought reasonless injury to Uzzah 
and the men of Beth-shemesh. 

Though all this must be admitted, however, it still 
is true that Yahweh always was to his people the type 
of all that was loftiest in morality. He had so long 
been distinguished above all things else by his good- 
ness to them, that he had become identified in their 
minds with righteousness itself. The two words 
had the same connotation. Hence, as the Hebrew 
concept of righteousness grew, the concept of Yah- 
weh grew with it, and whoever attained to a clearer 
vision than his fellows of justice and morality inter- 
preted it as a deeper insight into the nature of his 
god. This development of the concept of deity was 
especially favored by the fact that Yahweh was con- 
nected with none of the forces of nature, which should 
hinder the free course of theological thought and em- 
pirically determine his character. Freer even than 
Varuna from all objective phenomena, he was in a 
position to absorb into himself whatever moral ele- 
vation and lofty ideals the leaders of his people at- 
tained to. 

This righteous character of Yahweh is the key to 
the entire development of Hebrew religious thought ; 
it is the basis of all their argument, the presupposi- 
tion of all their reasoning. The problem of each 
successive generation is : given the righteousness of 



120 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

Yahweh, how interpret politics and history? This 
question appears to have confronted the thoughtful 
as early as the ninth century. The Canaanite Baals 
had been absorbed and largely forgotten, the Phoeni- 
cian Baals of Jezebel had been driven from the land ; 
Yahweh alone was worshiped, and Israel naturally 
looked for his favor and for success against his ene- 
mies. The exact opposite occurred, and the nation 
was humbled before the Syrian foe. The more 
thoughtful Israelites, therefore, seem to have asked 
themselves again and again the cause of this strange 
fact. 1 That Yahweh was able to protect them was 
evident from his great deeds in the past. Only one 
explanation was possible: he must be angry with 
his people for having worshiped other gods, and his 
anger still lasted after the other gods had been put 
away. This then must have been a more terrible sin 
than they had ever supposed. And its importance 
must lie in the difference between Yahweh and all 
other gods. This was not merely a difference in 
power ; the great distinction was that Yahweh alone 
was righteous. "So long as Yahweh differed merely 
in might and majesty from the gods of the nations, 
there was no right nor reason to declare the nullity 
of these latter. But now that a distinction in kind 
had taken the place of a difference in degree, that 
tendency to deny the reality of the gods, the tendency 
toward monotheism, was really present." 2 

1 Cf. Kueuen, " The Religion of Israel." 

2 Kueuen, pp. 368, 369. 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN ISRAEL 121 

It was, of course, only a few of the leading minds 
who reasoned in the way indicated ; and that any so 
reasoned is made likely only by the manifest progress 
between Elisha and the eighth-century prophets. 
But that some such idea was at least germinating 
in the thought of the nation there can be no doubt, 
for in the following century it gains clear expression 
in the words of the first of the great literary prophets 
— Amos. 

Amos was the first of the six great individuals who 
reshaped the Yahweh religion. 1 That these six 
men were in some sense spokesmen of their people is, 
of course, true ; had they not been, they could never 
have influenced their nation as they did. But it is 
also true that they were not spokesmen of their 
times. They were far in advance of their contem- 
poraries and opposed current views by ideas that were 
often revolutionary. No one can understand the 
history of the Hebrew religion who does not appre- 
ciate the importance of these six individuals. Their 
work is not to be accounted for by any facts of geo- 
graphical location and race psychology. Their con- 
tribution to the religion of their people was unique, 
and had it not been for them, the concept of Yahweh 
might well have had a very different development. 



1 The men referred to are, of course, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jere- 
miah, Ezekiel, and the Second Isaiah. The work of three of 
them, however, — namely, Hosea, Isaiah, and Ezekiel, — is not 
essential to our discussion ; hence no mention will be made of them 
here. 



122 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

In Amos the ethical nature of Yahweh suddenly 
reaches its zenith ; without a word of warning there 
breaks upon us a moral conception of God which 
in many respects has never been surpassed. How 
Amos attained to such lofty ideas we do not know; 
it may be they were due to intuition * and to the affec- 
tive life rather than to thought. But having them, 
it is evident that he must inevitably ascribe them to 
his God ; and it is equally plain that the God of such 
a man as Amos must differ, not in degree, but in kind 
from the "gods of the nations. " 

The conception of the righteous Yahweh, the em- 
bodiment of his loftiest ideals, so filled the mind of 
the thoughtful Judean shepherd as he followed the 
flock, that it was borne in upon him — partly we 
may suppose through conscious reasoning, partly 
from the great background of his mind — that his 
God was too righteous to behold with careless eye 
the iniquities of foreign nations, and that in His infi- 
nite superiority to all other gods He must needs inter- 
fere directly to punish guilt and to avenge the inno- 
cent. "For three transgressions of Edom, yea, for 
f our; I will not turn away the punishment thereof ; 
because he did pursue his brother with the sword 
and did cast off all pity." " For three transgressions 
of Moab, yea, for four, I will not turn away the pun- 
ishment thereof; because he burned the bones of 
the king of Edom into lime." 2 

1 In the sense denned on p. 43. 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN ISRAEL 1 23 

This transcendent position of Yahweh above all 
other gods was a continuation of the thought that 
had been growing in Israel for many years ; but the 
revolutionary idea that finds its first expression in 
Amos, and which meant a complete turning aside 
from the old tribal view of religion, breaks upon the 
reader in the words, "For three transgressions of 
Israel, yea, for four, I will not turn away the punish- 
ment thereof ; because they have sold the righteous 
for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes. " 1 

Simple reasoning from the premises was quite 
enough to bring the prophet to this conclusion. His 
own moral intuitions and his feeling for righteous- 
ness made him disgusted with the immorality and 
oppression he saw about him, with the hypocrisy and 
outwardness of the official worship ; and as Yahweh 
was to him the type of the moral ideal, he felt that 
these things must be even more abominable in Yah- 
weh' s sight than in his own. With so righteous a 
God and so sinful a people as his premises, he could 
come to no conclusion but the complete overthrow 
of the nation. Yahweh had punished His people in 
times past, but for smaller offences ; exile and political 
death alone were consistent with such sin as he saw 
before him. Hence the conception of Yahweh made 
yet a further advance ; He would not hesitate to de- 
stroy even His people, for the sake of justice. In truth, 
the very fact that Israel is His people brings with 

1 Amos 2 8 . 



124 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

it all the surer judgment. "You only have I known 
of all the families of the earth ; therefore will I punish 
you for your iniquities." It is vain for an unright- 
eous nation to trust that spite of their sins their god 
will protect them, and to prate of the "day of Yah- 
weh." The day of Yahweh shall come; "but to 
what end is it for you? The day of Yahweh is 
darkness and not light." Amos has no hope to offer. 
Destruction and exile is the sure result of Israel's 
sin, for Yahweh is righteous. With the clear eye of 
a statesman he saw the great power Assyria loom- 
ing up in the east, and he knew that without divine 
aid Israel must be crushed. To the future there- 
fore he appealed for the vindication of his conception 
of God. And the coming victory of Assyria, which 
should fulfill his words, was to his mind really the 
victory of Yahweh; for Assyria, like all other na- 
tions, was only Yahweh's instrument. 

These conceptions of Amos were, in part, scouted 
by the official classes and doubtless by the people; 
they were, in fact, the property of only a few thinkers 
in his time. But not long after they were forced 
upon popular acceptance by stern reality, when all 
the prophet's dire predictions were fulfilled by the 
Assyrian conquest. The pen of Amos would have 
had but little immediate influence in the cause of 
monotheism, but for the sword of Sargon. 

The age of Amos marked a genuine crisis in the 
Hebrew religion. The concept of Yahweh had to be 
enlarged or else suffer complete destruction. There 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN ISRAEL 1 25 

was no third possibility. Men were come to the 
parting of the ways. To be sure, the conception of 
God which had been held by the orthodox up to this 
time and which still remained the official and popular 
creed of both priests and people, had served its turn 
well enough during the early days of Hebrew history 
and in the prosperous reign of Jeroboam the Great. 
In fact the people had never been so zealous in their 
worship, never so universally and extravagantly loyal 
to Yahweh, as at the time when Amos broke in upon 
them with his terrible denunciations ^ And yet it is 
altogether certain that this creed, which had main- 
tained itself so easily in the days of Israel's prosperity, 
would have proved absolutely incapable of weather- 
ing the storm that was approaching, and would simply 
have gone to pieces on the rocks. The conception of 
God which it involved was consistent only with at least 
a fair degree of national prosperity, and was too small 
and too limited to stand the test of the disasters which 
began with the death of Jeroboam. The facts of his- 
tory ceased to point to the kind of god in whom 
Israel had, up to this time, believed. If Yahweh 
were only a tribal god, then with the destruction of 
His people he would cease to be a god altogether. 
If belief in Him was to survive the Assyrian conquest, 
it had to be overhauled and based on a new and en- 
larged conception of His nature. And this was the 
work of Amos. 

In looking back at the great religious heroes of the 
world we often forget that their work was largely 



126 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

critical and destructive, and that their orthodox 
contemporaries naturally regarded them as icono- 
clasts and schismatics. So it was with Amos. He 
was certainly considered a heretic by the orthodox 
of his day. He railed against the most sacred places 
and the most sacred things. " For thus saith Yahweh 
unto the house of Israel, Seek ye me, and ye shall live ; 
but seek not Beth-el, nor enter into Gilgal, and pass not 
to Beer-sheba. ... I hate, I despise your feasts, 
and I will take no delight in your solemn assemblies. 
Yea, though ye offer me your burnt-offerings and meal- 
offerings, I will not accept them ; neither will I receive 
the peace-offerings of your fat beasts. . . . But let 
justice roll down as waters, and righteousness as a 
mighty stream." 1 We may well imagine how the 
epithet of "mere morality" may have been stamped 
upon his teachings by the upholders of the traditional 
faith; and how the orthodox leaders of the people, 
who regarded anything new as necessarily false, 
looked askance at his heretical innovations. And 
we know how he was driven out of the shrine at 
Beth-el and out of the land by the high priest, the 
pillar of orthodoxy. Yet if he and those like him 
had held their peace, the religion of Yahweh would 
have perished in the next generation amid the ruins 
of Samaria, or at best would have lingered out a 
wretched existence till the capture of Jerusalem, 
and would then have vanished from the earth. The 

1 Amoss 4 ' 5 - 21 ' 22 ' 24 . 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN ISRAEL 12 7 

only thing that could make the religion of Yahweh 
proof against disaster and give it a sure and perma- 
nent foundation was a new and larger conception of 
the divine, a faith broad and catholic enough to ac- 
cept the whole of reality and face the truth whatever 
it might be. And the greatest step in this direction 
in the whole course of Hebrew history was that taken 
by Amos. 

Much, however, still remained to be done. Yah- 
weh was still somewhat local. He might allow 
Israel to be destroyed, but He Himself dwelt in a 
peculiar sense at Jerusalem, the Holy City, and doubt- 
less to the great majority of the people His religion 
was identified with the cult at the various Judean 
shrines. It was still incomprehensible to most that 
even Yahweh could remain a god if He had no nation 
to worship Him. God and people were still recipro- 
cal terms. The strange destruction of the army of 
Sennacherib, fulfilling in so striking a manner Isaiah's 
prophecy, confirmed the people in this belief and 
turned back the concept of Yahweh toward the old 
naturalistic and tribal form. And it must be 
admitted that this was the obvious conclusion to 
draw from the events; so far as logic goes it 
was quite as legitimate a piece of reasoning in the 
philosophy of history as many of the arguments 
of the prophets, and down to the very fall of the 
city it was the orthodox view. In fact, it might 
very well have given the decisive and fatal turn 
to the development of Jewish theology, had it not 



128 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

been for the rise at this time of the greatest of the 
prophets. 1 For it was the work of Jeremiah — and 
of Nebuchadrezzar — to show that Yahweh was 
independent of place, independent of worship, 
independent of people; that He was, in short, the 
God of the whole earth. 

The course of Jeremiah's reasoning was probably 
much the same as that of Amos — based, namely, 
upon Yahweh's power and righteousness as shown 
in all Hebrew history, including, in Jeremiah's case, 
Amos's own prophecy and its fulfillment in the de- 
struction of the northern kingdom by Assyria. The 
condition of Judah seemed analogous to that of 
Israel in Amos's time, and in Babylon Yahweh had 
an instrument for the punishment of sin, quite as 
powerful as Assyria had been. The unitary demand 
of the reason, moreover, as I shall point out later, 
doubtless had much to do in bringing the prophet to 
his conclusions. But there was more in Jeremiah's 
prophecies than conscious reasoning, and here, as so 
often elsewhere, we find thought and feeling too 
closely interwoven to be separated even for purposes 
of exposition. It was probably a combination of 
thought and the immediate insight of a religious 
genius — an intuition which came without conscious 
reasoning, a feeling for the greatness and goodness 
and uniqueness of his God — that finally carried him 

1 In a more detailed work mention should here be made of 
the writers of certain portions of Deuteronomy, who seem to have 
been the first absolute monotheists. Cf. esp. Deut. 4-1 1. 






RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN ISRAEL 1 29 

to the complete monotheistic point of view. The 
gods of the heathen are "no gods," as the heathen 
shall themselves one day recognize. " O Yahweh, my 
strength, and my fortress, and my refuge in the day of 
affliction, unto thee shall the nations come from the ends 
of the earth, and shall say, Surely our fathers have 
inherited nought but lies, vanity, and things wherein 
there is no profit." * "But Yahweh is the true God ; 
he is the living God, and an everlasting King ; at his 
wrath the earth trembleth, and the nations are not 
able to abide his indignation. ... He hath made 
the earth by his power, he hath established the world 
by his wisdom, and by his understanding hath he 
stretched out the heavens." 2 

With this extension of Yahweh's activity to the 
entire earth, all nations are made His instruments, 
and the scope of Jewish thought is no longer confined 
to the philosophy of its own history, but deals hence- 
forth with world history, and sees in it all the hand of 
its God. And here we come again upon the trace of 
that demand of the reason for a unitary explanation 
which led the thinkers of India to the concept of 
Brahman. Up to this point Jewish thought had been 
content with many explanations of human history; 
each nation had its own god, and doubtless the fate 
of each was determined by the will of its god and by 
his power as compared with that of other gods. But 
in the philosophy of history, as well as in meta- 
yer. 16 19 . 2 Jer. io 10 > 12 . 

K 



130 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

physics, the demand for a single explanation must 
sooner or later make itself felt — spite of the many 
incongruous facts — and the more rationalistic minds 
will work out a single hypothesis for the interpreta- 
tion of all events. It was in large part this impulse 
which led Jeremiah to the view that Yahweh's pur- 
pose was sufficient to explain all history, and when 
this standpoint was gained, the gods of the nations 
became altogether superfluous and were sloughed 
off like an outgrown shell that had been too long 
closing in the germinating thought. 

These lofty concepts of Jeremiah, though repu- 
diated by prince and priest and people during his 
life, were ultimately adopted by the whole nation, 
Nebuchadrezzar having done for him what Sargon 
did for Amos, and the fall of the city being almost 
universally interpreted as a confirmation of the 
prophet's ideas, as it was a fulfillment of his 
predictions. 

An example, however, of the double interpretation 
to which nearly every historical event is open to those 
coming to it with different preconceptions, is seen in 
the complaints of the people against Jeremiah, im- 
mediately after the fall of the city ; they attribute the 
national misfortune to their neglect, not of Yahweh, 
but of the "queen of heaven" (the planet Venus?). 
In fact their argument is not bad, and is a clear at- 
tempt to apply to history what we should call the 
Method of Single Difference: "For then had we 
plenty of victuals, and were well, and saw no evil. 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN ISRAEL 131 

But since we left off burning incense to the queen of 
heaven, and pouring out drink-offerings unto her, we 
have wanted all things, and have been consumed 
by the sword and by famine." * 

But, as I have said above, it was Jeremiah's ex- 
planation and Jeremiah's concepts that were adopted 
by the nation as a whole, 2 and with the fall of Jerusa- 
lem and the political death of the kingdom was born 
the complete monotheism of the Jews. It remained 
only for the prophet (or prophets) of the exile known 
as the Second Isaiah to ennoble the conception of God 
by his rhetoric and to carry out in still larger manner 
and with broader scope the philosophy of universal 
history begun by his predecessors. From his more 
commanding point of view and position in time, he is 
persuaded, he can understand many things which to 
them were still dark and inexplicable. The whole 
history of the world is in his eyes a clear demonstra- 
tion of the constant guidance of the great God. The 
old problems why Yahweh chose Israel in the first 
place and why, having chosen her, He gave her up 
to her foes, who, spite of her sins, were still more sin- 
ful than she, are now lighted up ; the great enigma 
of the Hebrew philosophy of history is solved. 
Israel indeed He has chosen, but it is not alone for 
Israel's sake, but that through her the divine and 
universal plan might be carried out. "It is too light 
a thing that thou art unto me a servant, to raise up 

1 Jer. 44 17 , 18 . 

2 Cf. Deut. 4-1 1, Ps. 97, 104, etc., etc. 



132 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of 
Israel ; so I appoint thee a light of the nations, to be 
my salvation unto the ends of the earth." 1 "I, 
Yahweh, have called thee in righteousness and will 
hold thy hand and will keep thee, and give thee for 
a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles ; 
to open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners 
from the dungeon, and them that sit in darkness out 
of the prison-house." 2 The Gentile nations, more- 
over, are not mere implements of punishment, as in 
Amos and Jeremiah, but ends in themselves as well ; 
and as in the past He used Assyria and Babylon 
in working out His great designs, so even now He is 
raising up Cyrus the Persian, to whom He speaks 
directly through His prophet : — 

"Thus saith Yahweh to his anointed, to Cyrus, 
whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations 
before him, ... I will go before thee, and make the 
rough places smooth ; I will break in pieces the doors 
of brass, and cut in sunder the bars of iron; . . . 
that thou mayest know that it is I, Yahweh, who call 
thee by thy name, even the God of Israel. For Jacob 
my servant's sake, and Israel my chosen, I have called 
thee by thy name ; I have surnamed thee, though thou 
hast not known me. I am Yahweh and there is none 
else ; besides me there is no God ; I will gird thee, 
though thou hast not known me ; that they may know 
from the rising of the sun and from the west that 

1 Is. 49 6 - 

2 Is. 42 6 , 7 . 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN ISRAEL 1 33 

there is none besides me ; I am Yahweh and there is 
none else. I form the light and create darkness; 
I make peace and create evil; I am Yahweh, that 
doeth all these things." 1 

With the second Isaiah, Yahweh is grown to be 
not merely the only but the universal God ; he has 
clean burst the shell of the tribal deity and has be- 
come the God of all nations. 

But while the problems of the philosophy of his- 
tory were now cleared up, there remained one problem 
in the life of the individual, about which Jewish thought 
was long troubled — the Problem of Evil. How is 
it possible that, if God is just and almighty, the 
righteous are so often afflicted, while the evil flourish 
like a green bay tree? The less observant and the 
less empirical thinkers — the rationalists, we might 
call them — had always insisted that these were not 
the facts, for the very good reason that they could 
not be. The righteous were always prosperous, 
the wicked always unfortunate, because it must 
be so. But that this easy optimism would not square 
with the facts became to the thoughtful more evident, 
and they cast about on all sides for an explanation. 
The most famous of these attempts fell in the Persian 
period and is preserved to us in the original book of 
Job (Chaps. 3-31, according to Professor Toy). 
Job absolutely repudiates the old solution of the 
problem. Conscious of his own integrity, he throws 

1 Is. 45 1 " 7 . 



134 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

down the challenge to the Almighty to point out 
wherein he has committed any sin at all propor- 
tionate to his suffering. 1 Yet the obvious logical 
conclusion he does not draw — namely, that God is 
lacking either in justice or in power. He is driven, 
therefore, to an agnostic position ; he has no solution 
for the problem. By searching he cannot find out 
God, nor know the Almighty unto perfection; His 
ways are not as our ways nor His thoughts as our 
thoughts. And yet though mere reasoning from the 
premises might very well have led him to the conclu- 
sion of an unjust God or to a doubt if there were any 
God at all, his unreasoning feeling and the religious 
demands of his nature forced him to cling to his 
faith, with the exclamation, " Though He slay me, 
yet will I trust Him." 

To sum up the results of this section, the develop- 
ment of the concept of God in the Hebrew Religion 
was due to the thoughtful — and in part the emo- 
tional — reaction of the people, and especially of its 
leaders, upon the events of human life. As the 
leaders of thought, from pondering over the mean- 
ing of history, gained higher conceptions of their God, 
they appealed with keen political foresight to future 
events to confirm their judgments, and as the ex- 
pected events or something like them often fol- 
lowed, they forced upon the rank and file conceptions 
approaching somewhat to their own. Since there 

1 Cf. esp. Chap. 31. 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN ISRAEL 135 

was always more or less sin in the community, and 
since, on the other hand, Yahweh's mercy might at 
any moment forgive sin, the hypothesis of an all- 
powerful and righteous and merciful God provided 
Israel with an absolutely infallible key to all past 
history and to all possible history. As Hebrew 
thought developed and went more deeply into things, 
and no longer confined itself to the events of one 
small district, it felt dissatisfied with a plurality 
of explanations for the new facts that came under its 
cognizance. It felt impelled to subsume all events 
under one formula, and the formula chosen for this 
was, of course, the one that had been so successfully 
used in the smaller sphere — the righteousness and 
power of Yahweh. Yet Hebrew thought never 
reached the monistic position of Brahmanism; for, 
in fact, the very concept — the righteousness of 
Yahweh — which had been most influential in bring- 
ing about monotheism stood in the way of absolute 
monism. The notion of such a monism seems never 
to have entered the head of a single ancient Hebrew ; 
it was out of all relation to their way of thinking. 
All their best thought was based upon the moral 
category, and this, unlike the ontological category, 
is dependent upon the existence of real distinctions. 
A god whose chief characteristic it was to be of purer 
eyes than to behold evil, and who could not look upon 
iniquity, could hardly develop into an Absolute who 
should merge evil and good into himself, and to 
whom "shadow and sunlight are the same." The 



136 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

empirical nature of Jewish thought also had the same 
tendency. Looking out upon the world they saw it 
filled with much evil as well as much good ; and though 
they believed that the purposes which they consid- 
ered to be those of their God would eventually triumph, 
they saw their progress was most slow, and that it 
was purchased at great cost. And as they were em- 
piricists rather than rationalists by nature, these 
facts were accepted at their face value; and any 
tendency that there may have been in their ethical 
monotheism toward absolute monism was thus 
killed in the germ. 

That in the course of their reasonings their premises 
were often insufficient for their conclusions is indeed 
perfectly obvious to us; and indeed we have little 
reason to doubt that it would have been obvious to 
them as well had the conclusions in question been 
based solely on reasoning. Not only is this probable 
in itself ; it is also made clear by the occasional skep- 
tical passages in Ecclesiastes and Proverbs. The 
truth is, the ancient Hebrew, like most other people, 
used his reason not merely to come to new conclusions, 
but also, and chiefly, to justify beliefs which arose in 
him from an entirely different source. And had it 
not been for the constant guidance and re enforce- 
ment given to his faith by religious feeling, he would 
never have evolved the religion for which he stands. 
To comprehend the true nature of his faith and its 
most unassailable foundations, therefore, we must 
turn to the Religion of Feeling. 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN ISRAEL 1 37 

III 

The phenomenon of possession meets us among the 
early Hebrews as among all peoples at their stage 
of culture, although our first account of it (i Sam. 
10) treats it as something new in Israel ; and in fact 
it seems to have been introduced at the time of 
Samuel and Saul by contagion, so to speak, from the 
Canaanites or Arabians. But wherever it came 
from it was the beginning of Hebrew prophecy. The 
nebiim, or prophets, like the dervishes of the East 
to-day, were highly excitable persons, who lived 
constantly near the boundary of that chaotic and 
irresponsible, yet at times wonderfully productive, re- 
gion of consciousness of which the sanest of us occa- 
sionally catch glimpses ; and who by the stimulus of 
music, the dance, the repetition of some sacred sylla- 
ble or formula, and each other's presence, were able 
to work themselves into a fit of frenzy in which they 
might say and do things for which they could after- 
ward give no account. Aroused perhaps by anger 
at the Philistine domination, these fanatical devotees 
of Yahweh wandered in bands through the country, 
playing on various musical instruments, dancing and 
driving themselves to sacred madness, which probably 
ended at times in complete unconsciousness. Sam- 
uel — himself a seer, or clairvoyant-by-the-grace- 
of- Yahweh — foretells to Saul, "Thou shalt meet a 
band of prophets coming down from the high place 
with a psaltery, and a timbrel, and a pipe, and a harp, 



138 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

before them ; and they will be prophesying : and the 
spirit of Yahweh will come mightily upon thee, and 
thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned 
into another man." * One should note here that it is 
the "Spirit of Yahweh 1 '' that "comes upon" men 
mightily and makes them prophesy ; and we read in 
the tenth verse, that when Saul met the prophets, 
the "Spirit of God came mightily upon him, and he 
prophesied among them." That the influence of 
such a wild scene as is presented by a group of Orien- 
tal dervishes must have great power over a sym- 
pathetic observer who holds the same general belief 
as they, and that it will tend to become contagious, 
will be evident to every one who has witnessed such 
a scene ; though in a mood for criticism or even for 
ridicule, one finds one's self involuntarily swaying 
to and fro in cadence with them and even forming 
incipiently in one's speech organs the sacred syllables 
of their chant. It is no wonder, therefore, that Saul 
found himself "prophesying" among them. This is, 
of course, merely a case of the familiar phenomenon 
of unconscious imitation through suggestion, bring- 
ing on finally a state akin to hypnosis. But to the 
devout believer in Yahweh such a sight as Saul sud- 
denly becoming ecstatic meant as a matter of 
course that the divine afflatus had descended upon 
him as upon the others, and we may be sure that no 
one was more perfectly persuaded of this than Saul 
himself. 

1 1 Sam. io 6 ' 6 . 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN ISRAEL 1 39 

A similar occasion is described in i Sam. 19, where 
Saul sends three messengers, one after another, with 
commands to David, who has taken refuge among 
the prophets. No sooner do the messengers reach 
the ecstatic band than the spirit of Yahweh comes 
upon them in the same mysterious manner, and they 
too " prophesy." At length Saul himself goes : " and 
the spirit of God came upon him also, and he went on, 
and prophesied, until he came to Naioth in Ramah. 
And he also stripped off his clothes, and he also 
prophesied before Samuel, and lay down naked all 
that day and all that night." * 

In course of time the rougher elements of prophecy 
were shaken off, and the phenomenon became less 
wild and more spiritual; yet up to the end, prophecy 
remained with many of its representatives a kind of 
sacred madness. "Elisha on one occasion needs 
the impulse of music before he can reveal the oracle of 
Yahweh ; and the four hundred prophets who proph- 
esy at Ahab and Jehosaphat's request at the gates of 
Samaria must clearly be conceived as in a condition 
of unnatural excitement and exaltation." 2 The 
old view of the nebiim is still found in 2 Kings 9 11 , 
where the word " prophet" is used as synonymous 
with madman or mad enthusiast, — implying that 
an ecstatic condition and even utterances due to a 
kind of possession were still expected of the prophets. 



1 1 Sam. 19 23 ' 24 . 

2 Montefiori, "Hibbert Lectures," p. 95. 



140 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

And even in Jer. 2 c/ 6 we find madness still connected 
in a general way with the popular idea of prophecy. 
But it must be remembered that this madness was a 
sacred madness, and that both prophet and be- 
holder believed that in this mysterious way the 
Spirit of Yahweh made connection with the human 
spirit. 

This early form of prophecy has almost the same 
relation to the later form as Tapas in India bore to 
the mysticism of the Upanishads ; the two phenomena 
are clearly distinct, yet both have their roots in the 
vast feeling background of consciousness. 

The new character of religious feeling and the 
great difference between it and the wildness of early 
prophetism strikes one at once on opening the Book 
of Amos. With considerable emphasis Amos asserts 
that he is no prophet nor one of the sons of the proph- 
ets. There is nothing about him that suggests the 
old shamanistic phenomenon of i Sam. 10 and 19. 
Yet he is as certain that it is Yahweh who bids him 
speak as any of his predecessors were of their own 
prophetic calling. "Surely the Lord Yahweh will 
do nothing, but he revealeth his secrets unto his 
servants the prophets. The Hon hath roared, who 
will not fear ? The Lord Yahweh hath spoken, who 
can but prophesy?" * 

These words of Amos are typical of all the great 
prophets. They are sure that what they speak is 

1 Amos 3 7 ' 8 . 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN ISRAEL 141 

not their own ; it is forced upon them from without. 
As pointed out in the last chapter, many of the con- 
victions of the prophets are not to be accounted for 
by conscious reasoning, but seem to be rather matters 
of religious feeling or intuition. Still oftener does 
this seem to be the case with their particular pro- 
nouncements. If we may trust their statements at all, 
we must admit that a great many of their declarations 
were not consciously reasoned to, but came full-formed 
into their minds, and bear with them that sense of 
externality which Professor James has shown to be so 
often characteristic of the productions of the sub- 
conscious. The prophets did not so much reason as 
hear and see ; they felt themselves to be merely the 
channels through which a greater Consciousness 
with which they made connections expressed itself. 
Personally they considered themselves but passive 
instruments unable to resist this greater will — "The 
Lord Yahweh hath spoken, who can but prophesy?" 
The external character of the message is signified 
by the expression so common among the prophets, 
"the hand of Yahweh." Thus Isaiah says "Yah- 
weh spoke to me with a strong hand and instructed 
me." * In Jeremiah this externality is so strong 
that he resists it, but in vain. "O Yahweh," he 
exclaims, "thou hast persuaded me, and I was per- 
suaded ; thou art stronger than I, and hast prevailed : 
I am become a laughing-stock all the day, every one 

1 Is. 8 U . 



142 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

mocketh me. For as often as I speak, I cry out ; I cry, 
Violence and destruction" — that is, if he opens his 
lips, he involuntarily utters the unwelcome message 
of Yahweh which is made a reproach and a derision 
to him all the day. Yet speak he must, for "if I 
say, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any 
more in his name, then there is as it were a burning 
fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with for- 
bearing, and I cannot contain." * With Ezekiel the 
external and compulsory nature of the message is no 
less striking. With him it usually takes the form 
of a vision, and these visions he describes with great 
exactness, often noting the time, place, and circum- 
stances under which they came. He also uses more 
than any other prophet the expression "the hand of 
Yahweh was upon me." "And it came to pass in 
the sixth year, in the sixth month, in the fifth day of 
the month, as I sat in my house, and the elders of 
Judah sat before me, that the hand of the Lord Yah- 
weh fell there upon me. Then I beheld, and, lo, a 
likeness, as the appearance of fire" 2 — etc. "Then 
the spirit lifted me up, and I heard behind me the 
voice of a great rushing, saying, Blessed be the glory 
of Yahweh from his place. And I heard the noise 
of the wings of the living creatures as they touched 
one another, and the noise of the wheels beside them, 
even the noise of a great rushing. So the spirit lifted 
me up, and took me away ; and I went in bitterness, 

1 Jer. 20 7 - 9 . Cf . also Jer. 17 15 . « 

2 Ezek. 8 1 , 2 , 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN ISRAEL 1 43 

in the heat of my spirit ; and the hand of Yahweh 
was strong upon me." 1 

The consciousness of the immediate inspiration 
of Yahweh seems to have gradually brought with it 
for the prophets a new meaning into religion. Up till 
their time Yahweh had been only the God of the na- 
tion ; with them He begins to be the God of the indi- 
vidual. This is not confined to any one prophet. 
We may find a suggestion of it even in Amos and cer- 
tainly in Hosea. It comes into prominence, how- 
ever, only with Jeremiah. He is abandoned by all 
and only Yahweh is left him. "But now we find 
what we have never met with in any prophet before 
this time. Jeremiah appears in continual dialogue 
with Yahweh. He complains, he contradicts him, 
contends with him, defends himself against him, but 
is ever worsted by him. Yet in the midst of his grief 
and despair, he awakes to the consciousness that the 
words of Yahweh are really the joy and the rapture 
of his heart, because Yahweh's name has been put 
upon him, that is to say because he is Yahweh's pos- 
session." 2 " Heal me, Yahweh, that I maybe healed ; 
help me, that I may be helped, for thou art my praise." 3 
" Denounce, and we will denounce him, say all my fa- 
miliar friends . . . and we shall take our revenge on 

1 Ezek. 3 12 " 1 *. For other passages illustrating the externality 
of the message cf. 1 K 22 19 ; Amos 7 1 , 9 1 ; Is. 6; Jer. i 11-13 ; Ez. 
1 1 - 3 , 2, 3 22 , 8, 9-1 1, 37, 40-48; Zech. i 8 -6 8 . 

2 Budde, "Religion of Israel to the Exile," p. 197. 
8 Jer. 17". 



144 TB[ E PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

him. But Yahweh is with me as a mighty one and 
a terrible; therefore my persecutors shall stumble, 
and they shall not prevail. . . . But, O Yahweh of 
hosts, that triest the righteous, that seest the heart 
and the mind, . . . unto thee have I revealed my 
cause." * 

This consciousness of the presence of Yahweh 
with the individual and for the sake of the individual, 
and known, not by sight nor by reasoning, but by the 
immediate testimony of feeling, was never thereafter 
lost among the Hebrews. It is to be found — though 
in a much less attractive form than in Jeremiah — > 
even in Ezekiel. The establishment of the synagogue 
had much to do in spreading among the people this 
new form of religious experience; for in these less 
formal gatherings of Yahweh's people the devout 
worshiper could himself take part in the service, 
without the intervention of priest or bloody victim, 
and thus felt a direct and personal relation to his 
God which his ancestors had never conceived. But 
nowhere else is this form of religious feeling more 
fully expressed than in the Psalms. These, indeed, 
never go to the extremes of Indian and Christian 
mysticism, in the narrower and more technical mean- 
ing of the word ; they do not speak of ecstasy nor 
of God being in man. But for them God is "very 
near" to man, and they are pervaded with a calm, 
glad sense of His presence and with a simple and 

1 Jer. 20 10 - 12 . Cf. also Jer. 15 15 - 21 and 32 36 -* 1 . 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN ISRAEL 1 45 

earnest yearning after Him that make them unique 
in literature. 

" Whom have I in heaven but thee? 

And there is none on earth that I desire besides thee." 1 

" As the hart panteth after the water brooks 

So panteth my soul after thee, O God. 

My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: 

When shall I come and appear before God ? " 2 

"Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? 

Or whither shall I flee from thy presence ? 

If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there ; 

If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art there : 

If I take the wings of the morning, 

And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea ; 

Even there shall thy hand lead me, 

And thy right hand shall hold me. 

If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me up, 

Even the night shall be light about me. 

For the darkness hideth not from thee, 

But the night shineth as the day : 

The darkness and the light are both alike to thee. 

How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God ! 

How great is the sum of them ! 

If I should count them, they are more in number than the 

sand: 
When I awake I am still with thee." 3 
" The Lord is my shepherd ; I shall not want. 
He maketh me to He down in green pastures; 
He leadeth me beside still waters. 
He restore th my soul ; 

1 Ps. 73 25 . 

2 Psalm 42 1 ' 2 . — Cf. Rig Veda I. 25, 16, 17, 19, quoted in the 
last chapter. 

3 Ps. 1397-12,17-18. 



146 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

He guideth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's 

sake. 
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of 

death, 

I will fear no evil; for thou art with me." x 

Between the 23d Psalm and the phenomenon of 
possession and prophetism as depicted in 1 Sam. 19, 
there is the same difference as that between civiliza- 
tion and savagery. But both are matters of feeling 
rather than of reason or of sense ; and in both cases 
the individual is conscious of the presence of a great 
power or a great life, not his, yet close to him, and 
which he feels he must obey and may rely upon. 

IV 

In these last three chapters I have traced (perhaps 
at undue length) the story of the three kinds of reli- 
gious belief. The story in its general outlines is 
much the same in all religions, India and Israel 
being merely typical of mankind in general. Every- 
where the same three factors are at work. Every- 
where we find the primitive basis of belief giving 
way before the advance of thought, thought bringing 
forth its twin offspring, theology and doubt, and turn- 
ing at every crisis for strength and sure support to 
religious feeling and the instinctive demands which 
the human organism makes of the Cosmos. Among 
every people, moreover, in which the Religion of 
Feeling has attained its full development, we find two 

1 Ps. 23 1 - 4 . 






RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN ISRAEL 147 

perfectly distinct kinds of religious emotion. One is 
a violent form of excitement, a passionate, abnormal 
flinging away of all self-control, a sort of religious 
intoxication indulged in largely for its delightful 
effects, a sacred madness, typified by the Dionysian 
dance of the Greeks and the shamanism of the Mon- 
gols. It is very susceptible of cultivation, and elabo- 
rate methods are concocted and pursued to bring it 
about. It is seen at its best in uncivilized peoples or 
among the less cultured members of civilized com- 
munities. The second type, though intense, is calm 
and quiet in its expression and usually spontaneous in 
its origin. Unlike the first, it is inhibited rather 
than induced by the presence of a crowd. It comes 
most often in solitude and it never goes to the fan- 
tastic and abnormal extremes of the first type. A 
fairly high scale of culture seems to be the condition 
of its appearance ; one must look for it, not among the 
ecstatic dancers and medicine-men of the uncivilized, 
but among the Indian mystics, the Hebrew prophets, 
and the great religious leaders the world over. 

These various influences, primitive and authorita- 
tive, intellectual, emotional, are to be found, as I have 
said, in all developed religions; and to this Chris- 
tianity is no exception. They make themselves felt 
both in the historical Christianity of the past and in 
the living Christianity of the present. To trace their 
influence here — in both the life of the religion and 
the life of the individual — will be the task of the 
following chapters. 



CHAPTER VI 

THREE PHASES OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF 

In an exhaustive treatment of the development of 
religious belief an account should of course be given, 
at least in outline, of the origin and growth of the 
Christian idea of God. To attempt to give such an 
account here, however, would expand this work to 
most unwieldy proportions, and I shall therefore take 
the Christian conception of Deity for granted, so to 
speak, merely pointing out in passing its principal his- 
torical sources, namely: (i) The Hebrew ethical 
monotheism already discussed, with its decidedly 
anthropomorphic God. (2) The religious experi- 
ence of Jesus — His sense of direct communion with 
the divine — which has had such an immense influ- 
ence on all subsequent religious history. (3) The 
ideas of incarnation, atonement, the theory of the 
Logos, and other doctrines of the New Testament 
writers. (4) The intellectual monotheism of Plato 
and Aristotle (particularly the latter) which depicted 
God as removed from the world and as being pure 
thought, self-contemplation, omniscience, and the 
principle of order. (5) The mystic vein in Greek 
religion and philosophy, starting amid the wild dances 

148 



THREE PHASES OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF 1 49 

of Dionysos, refined in the teachings of the Orphic 
cult, and brought to full expression and handed on to 
Christianity by the Neo- Platonic school and Dionysius 
the Areopagite. I shall say no more in this place 
of the content of the idea of God, but shall devote 
this chapter to a consideration of our three psychologi- 
cal bases of belief as seen in certain phases of Chris- 
tianity. For this purpose I shall use the attitude 
of mediaeval Christendom toward the Church as illus- 
trative of the Religion of Primitive Credulity ; Chris- 
tian Mysticism as the type of the Religion of Feeling ; 
and the rationalism of the eighteenth century in 
England as an example of the Religion of the Under- 
standing. 

I 

The Middle Ages, as every one knows, were pre- 
eminently characterized by the dominance of author- 
ity in all fields of thought and particularly in matters 
of faith. Both kinds of authority as distinguished 
in previous chapters were of the greatest importance 
all through this period, and were often so intermingled 
that it is impossible to separate them in any psycho- 
logical description of the faith of the times. Au- 
thority — especially in the earlier part of the Middle 
Ages — was the one great basis of faith, but it was 
so both in the sense of primitive credulity and as an 
argument from which one might reason. In the faith 
of the common people naive and unthinking accept- 
ance of the teachings of the Church certainly played 



150 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

the greatest part, and even among the philosophers 
and theologians it held the preponderant influence. 
The traditional teachings of the Church were simply 
taken as beyond question and accepted because pre- 
sented, in the same way exactly as the child accepts 
without question the teaching of his parents. Even 
so able a thinker as St. Augustine says of his belief 
in important matters, " This is my faith because it is 
the Catholic faith," and in another connection he 
remarks, "I should not believe the Scriptures unless 
the authority of the Catholic Church persuaded me." 
Throughout the earlier Middle Ages reason is often 
ostentatiously given a secondary position, and on many 
a point the leaders of thought accept with the greatest 
avidity those teachings of the Church most difficult 
to reconcile with logic, giving as their reason "quia 
irnpossibile" Thought indeed has its use, but this 
is neither to criticise the doctrines of the Church nor 
to come to independent conclusions of its own, but 
simply to explain the dogma and to demonstrate its 
truth. Theology and true philosophy are one, — 
for the good reason that if philosophy does not agree 
with theology, it is not true. Faith comes first and 
must precede reason. One does not think in order 
rationally to believe ; one believes in order to know. 
It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that 
this attitude of subservience to authority was typical 
of all thinkers throughout the entire period of the 
Middle Ages. It was indeed characteristic of the 
great mass of Christians, and authority may truly 



THREE PHASES OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF 151 

be said to have been the great basis of belief right 
up to the Reformation. But beginning with early 
times there were occasional tokens of dissatisfaction 
with the absolute power of authoritative dogma, 
which, though of little influence at the time, were 
prophetic of the future. Rare at first, the thinkers 
who represented this new tendency grew constantly 
more numerous and more influential and modified 
imperceptibly even the most orthodox opinion. The 
authority of the Church had no stronger advocate 
in the eleventh century than St. Anselm, yet the 
change is already apparent if we compare him with 
his great predecessor, Augustine. Anselm, indeed, 
puts faith before knowledge and reason, yet he no 
longer believes "quia irnpossibile" and his aim, un- 
like that of Augustine, is not to formulate, but to 
justify, the dogmas of Christianity. That a rational 
justification of faith should be thought necessary was 
a more significant fact than Anselm may have sup- 
posed. The same feeling for the value and impor- 
tance of reason in matters of dogma is carried still 
farther in Abelard, who deliberately opposes naive 
credulity in religion; and Richard of St. Victor 
writes : "I have often read that there is but one God, 
that this God is one as to substance, three as to 
persons, etc. . . . We frequently hear and read 
such statements, but I do not remember ever having 
read how they are proved. There is an abundance 
of authorities on these questions, but an extreme 
dearth of arguments, proofs, and reasons. Hence 



152 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

the problem is to find a firm, immovable, and certain 
basis on which to erect the system." 1 

One of the first great revolts of reason against au- 
thority came in the middle of the thirteenth century, 
at the court of the Emperor Frederic II, in southern 
Italy. The spirit of rationalism and cool criticism 
was in the air, the intellectual life of the court was 
dominated by the influence of Averroes, the Arab 
philosopher, and the relative truth and value of the 
Christian, Jewish, and Mohammedan religions were 
openly questioned. This whole movement, how- 
ever, was under the ban of the Church and was con- 
fined to a comparative few; the orthodox thinkers 
and the people at large had not yet come to doubt 
that, whether or not reason was necessary to support 
faith, the outcome of the two must be identical. 
But from the time of the acceptance of Aristotle by 
the Church an entirely different view of the relation 
of reason and revelation came into vogue — namely 
the "doctrine of the twofold truth," the recogni- 
tion that some things may be true theologically 
which are not true philosophically. The world 
of revealed faith and the world of natural reason 
are two more or less independent spheres. The 
former of the two is still, of course, the superior, but 
the recognition of a fundamental difference marked 
a great step toward the independence and final 
dominance of reason. The alienation between the 

1 Quoted by Weber, "History of Philosophy," p. 231. 



THREE PHASES OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF 1 53 

two realms once separated grew more and more pro- 
nounced throughout the later Middle Ages, and the 
attempts made by such men as Albert and Thomas 
to harmonize them were more than outweighed by the 
work of Duns Scotus, Occam, and others like them. 
The cleft between faith and reason was still more 
deepened when the recognition of the " twofold 
truth" came to be used by thinkers less devout than 
Occam and less loyal to the Church, as a cloak for 
independent investigation; for these less orthodox 
thinkers maintained implicitly that the truth was not 
merelv" twofold," but double, and that the teachings 
of theology and philosophy were really quite inde- 
pendent and might be even contradictory. This 
done, authority and reason once squarely set against 
each other, the victory of the latter over her former 
mistress was only a question of time. To follow 
out in detail the struggle between the two would ex- 
pand this book to most unwieldy dimensions and 
would be also entirely aside from our present pur- 
pose, which is not to give the history of the Christian 
Church, but merely to point out in a very general 
way a few typical and instructive cases of Christian 
belief based on authority. Suffice it to say that one 
great turning point in the struggle between reason 
and authority came with the Reformation, when, 
for a large portion of Christendom, the authority of 
the Church was overthrown. The conflict, how- 
ever, by no means ended here, for a new authority — 
namely, that of a book — was substituted for that of 



154 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

Pope and council, and so the old war went on. The 
latest phase of this struggle — the direct attack upon 
the authority of the Scriptures — will be taken up 
later in connection with Deism and the Religion of 
Thought ; for in this its last position authority is no 
longer a matter of primitive credulity but is rather a 
kind of reasoned belief. Before touching upon this, 
however, we must consider a phase of Christian be- 
lief which considerably antedates it in time, and 
which, in fact, went almost hand in hand with the 
scholastic belief from authority. I refer to Christian 
mysticism, which, though found in every age of Chris- 
tianity, has many of its most typical examples in the 
Middle Ages. 

II 

Mysticism is a word of so many meanings * that it 
bears little significance unless accompanied by a defini- 
tion. The general drift of our study will, however, sug- 
gest the sense in which I intend to use the word. I 
do not mean by it a doctrine of metaphysical monism, 
nor telepathy and spiritualism, but rather an episto- 
mological doctrine and the experience on which this 
is based. Dr. J. R. Illingworth has defined it as 
"the belief that the human spirit is capable of an 
immediate apprehension of absolute being or reality ; 
an apprehension, that is to say, which is not inferential, 
but intuitive ; without intermediate stages, and there- 

1 Cf. the twenty-six different uses of the word noted by Inge 
in the Appendix to his " Christian Mysticism." 



THREE PHASES OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF 1 55 

fore incapable of explanation, but for the same reason 
infallibly sure" ; or, in theological terms, it is the be- 
lief "that the soul is capable of immediate union or 
communion with God." * To put it more briefly, 
mysticism, as I shall use the term, might be defined 
as belief in God based chiefly on an immediate 
experience whose dominant element is feeling. 
Whether or not such a definition leaves room for all 
those persons who are sometimes called mystics, 
every one will recognize that it denotes at least a 
large and clearly marked region of religious expe- 
rience. 

This is, of course, no place to give anything like 
an exhaustive account of Christian mysticism, from 
either an historical or a psychological point of view. 
I wish merely to point out a few characteristics which 
every one familiar with the mystics will recognize as 
extremely common, if not universal, among them. In 
the first place, then, the mystic makes a deliberate and 
conscious attempt to get rid of the discursive form of 
thought and to substitute for it some form of imme- 
diate experience which shall be beyond all reasoning. 
The methods used by some of the mystics were not 
different in principle from that of the Yogins of 
India described on pages 103-105. 2 It consists of 



2 Cf. an article by B. de Montmorand, " Ascetism et Mystique," 
Revue Philosophique, LVII. 242 ff. See also Rechenbergius's 
" Exercitationum in N. Testamentum " (Lipsiae, 1707) for an ac- 
count of the methods of the Quietist monks on Mt. Athos in the 



156 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

two parts : in the first, by means of ascetic prac- 
tices the soul is made void of the world and ceases to 
be distracted by interest in the environment ; in the 
second, thought becomes less active and the whole 
consciousness is dominated by the emotional intui- 
tion of God, reenforced by all the life of the feeling 
background. The mystic puts himself in a mood of 
waiting and a state of emptiness for the marginal 
forces to fill. 

Different mystics make use of different methods 
for reaching the final condition where the discursive 
thought of the individual shall be replaced by the 
feeling state, but in principle nearly all substantially 
agree. The Father of Christian mysticism, Diony- 

14th century. Their directions for attaining the mystic state were as 
follows: " Attendi,ut facias quod Tibi dico: clausis foribussedeas 
in uno aliquo angulo seorsim, mentemque tuam abstractas ab 
omni vanitate, re fragili et caduca. Deinde mentum tuum pectori 
innexum inhaereat, moveasque sensibilem oculum cum tota mente 
tua in medio ventris, in umbilicum scilicet; quin etiam constringe 
attractionem spiritus narium, ut non facile spires ; et inquire intus 
in visceribus, ut reperias locum cordis, ubi animi facultates morari 
solent. Et primum quidem invenies tenebras et crassitudinem 
minime cedentem ; ubi vero perstiteris, ac dies noctesque in hoc 
opere consumeris, O rem admirandam ! percipies laetitiam, quae 
nullo puncto temporis intermittit. Quamprimum enim mens locum 
cordis reperit, statim adspicit, quae numquam sciebat. Siquidem 
viso aere, qui inter spatium cordis extat, se ipsa totam lucidam et 
discernendam praebet." Rechenbergius goes on to say, " Quare 
recte Umbilicanimi dicti sunt, quod ad umbilicum adpresso capite 
animam illiusque facultates quaererent, ac invenientes, turn demum 
lumine implerentur, atque divinam quandam et increatam lucem 
videre se, ardoremque sancti Spiritus concipere acper nares efflare, 
dicerent," pp. 388-389. 



THREE PHASES OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF 157 

sius the Areopagite, has indeed no definite system; 
but in his directions to Timothy for obtaining the 
desired condition, the germ, at least, of the later more 
elaborate methods is to be found. In his "Mystic 
Theology" he says, "But thou, O dear Timothy, 
by thy persistent commerce with the mystic visions, 
leave behind sensible perceptions and intellectual 
efforts, and all objects of sense and of intelligence, and 
all things being and not being, and be raised aloft 
unknowingly to the union, as far as attainable, with 
Him Who is above every essence and knowledge. 
For by the resistless and absolute ecstasy in all purity, 
from thyself and all thou wilt be carried on high to 
the superessential ray of the divine darkness, when 
thou hast cast away all and become free from 
all." * 

Ascetic practices are used by a large proportion of 
the mystics in order to deaden all carnal desires 
and drive out the individual will — even such an un- 
systematic mystic as St. Francis of Assisi making use 
of them in preparation for the "divine mysteries." 
Readers of the " Fioretti " will recall many passages 
like the following: "And the feast of the Assump- 
tion being now come, Saint Francis began the holy 
fast with great abstinence and severity, mortifying 
his body and comforting his spirit with fervent pray- 
ers, vigils, and scourgings; and in these prayers 
ever growing from virtue to virtue he made ready 

1 ''The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite," translated by 
Parker, p. 130. 



158 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

his soul for the divine mysteries and the divine 
splendors." * 

Many of the mystics have a definitely formulated and 
systematic procedure, consisting of several steps and 
culminating always in the sense of union with the di- 
vine. Thus Hugo of St. Victor has five stages, begin- 
ning with reading of the Scriptures and thinking on 
religious subjects, and ending in the -ecstatic union with 
God. St. Teresa, St. Francois de Sales, St. John of the 
Cross, and Madame Guyon have similar methods. 2 
These, as a rule, start with ''meditation" on some 
sacred subject, all other interests being thus shut out, 
followed by "contemplation," a more restricted and 
intense form of experience, in which the conscious- 
ness is still further narrowed ; and this in turn gives 
way to an experience from which all discursive 
thought and all intellectual effort have disappeared. 

Those mystics who have no such violent expe- 
riences as the Spaniards and French, and who have 
devised no definite method of attaining the ecstatic 
condition, still recognize the necessity of giving up all 
individual reasoning if one would hear God speak in 
the heart. Dionysius the Areopagite teaches that, 
as in thinking we must shut out the interruption of 
the senses, so in seeking the immediate knowledge of 
God we must shut out thought. "It is during the 

1 "Fioretti," translated by T. W. Arnold, p. 182. 

2 Cf. Leuba's two articles, "Tendances Religieuses chez le 
Mystiques Chretiens," in the Revue Philosophique, LIV, 1-36 and 
441-487, especially 45°"455- 



THREE PHASES OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF 1 59 

cessation of every mental energy that such a union as 
this of the deified minds toward the superdivine light 
takes place." * "We ought to know that our mind 
has the power for thought through which it views 
things intellectual, but that the union through which 
it is brought into contact with things beyond itself 
surpasses the nature of the mind. We must then 
contemplate things Divine after this union, not after 
ourselves, but by our whole selves, standing out of 
our whole selves, and becoming wholly of God." 2 
Bernard of Clairvaux says great is the philosopher 
who seeks the eternal by means of thought, but great- 
est of all is he who, spurning the senses and the 
intellect, soars by a direct flight to the divine. 3 The 
sermons of Meister Eckhart are full of exhortations 
to give up all processes of reasoning, as a necessary 
step to attaining the higher sort of knowledge. 
"The emptier your mind, the more susceptible are 
you to the working of His influence." "Memory, 
understanding, will, all tend toward diversity and 
multiplicity of thought, therefore you must leave 
them all aside, as well as perception, ideation, and 
everything in which you find yourself or seek your- 
self. Only then can you experience this new birth 
— otherwise never." "If you would know God, 

1 "Divine Names," in Parker's translation, p. 8. 

2 Ibid., p. 87. 

3 " Qui spreto ipso usu rerum et sensuum, . . . non ascen- 
soriis gradibus, sed inopinatis excessibus, avolare interdum 
contemplando ad ilia sublimia consuevit." — "De Considera- 
tione," V, 2. 



160 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

your own knowledge can serve you not a whit. 
Do not suppose that your understanding can ever 
so increase that you can come to know God by means 
of it ; for if God is to shine divinely within your soul 
no natural light can help in any way. Rather must it 
sink to an absolute nothing and wholly cease to be. 
And then can God shine with His own light within 
you and bring with Him all that you have laid aside 
and a thousand fold more, including it all within 
Himself." ' 

The chief rule for gaining this highest stage of 
mystic knowledge is, therefore, not to try to gain it. 
You guide yourself toward it best by ceasing to guide 
yourself at all. Thought and will are only a hin- 
drance. By emptying yourself of all the light of 
common day, you put yourself in a state in which the 
heavenly light may shine upon you if it will; but 
you cannot compel it. Those mystics who have the 
most elaborate methods of inducing the ecstatic con- 
dition are the ones who most strongly insist upon its 
independence of human will and human effort. The 
first two stages, "meditation" and "contemplation," 
are indeed in one's power, but the final stage is a 
divine gift pure and simple. You cannot force it. 
It is like the wind which bloweth where it listeth — ■ 
you hear its sound and gratefully feel its breath upon 
your cheek, but cannot tell whence it comes nor 
whither it goes. Absolute passivity is the condition 

1 Meister Eckhart's "Mystische Schriften," put into modern 
German by Gustav Landaur, pp. 20, t,Z, 34, 35- 



THREE PHASES OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF l6l 

of receiving it. The repeated assertions of the 
mystics as to this remind one of the common testi- 
mony in conversion cases: "I had to stop trying 
first." The Little will of the conscious and limited 
individual must simply give up before the deeper will 
of the larger personality, stretching out from the 
conscious center no one knows how far, can take 
control. 

The experience thus resulting seems to the mystic 
different in kind from the ordinary. It is like being 
lifted suddenly into a fourth dimension. So utterly 
removed from every other form of experience is it, 
that it can be described, if at all, only in negative 
terms or in expressions that seem self-contradictory. 
Thus Dionysius writes, "The Divine gloom is the 
unapproachable light in which God is said to dwell. 
And into this gloom, invisible indeed on account of 
surpassing brightness, and unapproachable on ac- 
count of the excess of the superessential stream of 
light, enters every one deemed worthy to know and to 
see God, by the very fact of neither seeing nor know- 
ing, really entering into Him who is above vision and 
knowledge." * In truth the experience is simply not 
to be described. The soul " finds no terms, no 
means, no comparison whereby to render the sub- 
limity of the wisdom and the delicacy of the spiritual 
feeling with which she is filled. . . . Accordingly 
in this knowledge, since the senses and the imagina- 
tion are not employed, we get neither form nor im- 

1 "Letter to Dorotheus," Parker's translation, p. 144. 
M 



1 02 THE PSYCHOLOGY OE RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

pression, nor can we give any account nor furnish 
any likeness, although the mysterious and sweet- 
tasting wisdom comes home so clearly to the inmost 
parts of the soul. Fancy a man seeing a certain 
kind of thing for the first time in his life. He can 
understand it, use it, and enjoy it, but he cannot apply 
a name to it, nor communicate any idea of it, even 
though all the while it be a mere thing of sense. How 
much greater will be his powerlessness when it goes 
beyond the senses ! . . . However sublime and 
learned may be the terms we employ, how 
utterly vile, insignificant, and improper they are, 
when we seek to discourse of divine things by their 
means!" 1 "No life can express it nor tongue so 
much as name what the fire of the inflaming love of 
God is." 2 "All the truths which the masters have 
ever taught with their own reason and their own 
understanding or which they will teach in the future 
up to the Last Day, contain not the least particle 
of this knowledge and of this mystery. If it should 
be called a not-knowing and an ignorance, 3 it would 
still include within itself more than all knowledge and 
all wisdom from without." 4 

1 Quoted from St. John of the Cross, by Professor James, 
"Varieties of Religious Experience," pp. 407, 408. 

2 Jacob Behmen, quoted in Bucke's " Cosmic Consciousness." 

3 " Wenn es schon ein Unwissen heiss und eine Unerkanntheit." 

4 Eckhart, op. cit., p. 22. Cf . Lao-tze : " The reason that can be 
reasoned is not the eternal Reason. The name that can be named 
is not the eternal name." ("Tao-Teh King," I, 1, translated by 
Paul Carus.) 



THREE PHASES OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF 1 63 

In their attempts to describe this experience which 
they so generally call indescribable, the mystics vary 
with the longitude. Some have visions, some " locu- 
tions," some have trances ending in unconsciousness, 
while some know of no such intense experience but 
speak of a calm and quiet ecstasy. St. Teresa speaks 
of Jesus, St. Francois de Sales of the Virgin, Suso of 
the "Eternal Wisdom" in the form of a beautiful 
maiden. These should be regarded as the excres- 
cences and exaggerations of mysticism and in no way 
essential to it. The great majority of the mystics 
neither have nor desire any such visions, but consider 
them thoroughly abnormal and dangerous; in fact 
they often speak of them as the delusions of Satan. 
To take the extreme cases as the typical ones is a 
mistaken method. But with all their variations, 
there are two things to which, I believe, all the 
mystics bear testimony : firstly, the ineffable nature 
of the experience, already referred to, and secondly, 
the absolute assurance that in it they have come into 
conscious connection with a larger life near to or sur- 
rounding them and continuous with theirs. 

The simplest and commonest example of this, 
and after all the best and most really typical, is found 
in every sincere and earnest prayer. Whoever prays 
not merely with the belief, but with the immediate 
sense that God is with him and hears, is to that extent 
a mystic and a mystic of the highest type. This sense 
of the divine presence sometimes fills the prayerful 
mind to such an extent as to leave no room for con- 



164 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

fession or request. In all the annals of Christianity 
no finer example of mysticism is to be found than St. 
Francis on his knees in prayer throughout the night, 
and unable to ask for anything, but simply crying 
out, "My God, my God!" "St. Francis . . . rose 
up from his bed and set himself to pray, lifting up 
his hands and eyes unto heaven, and with exceeding 
great devotion and fervor said, 'My God, my God !' 
And thus saying and sorely weeping, he abode till 
morning, alway repeating, 'My God, my God!' 
and naught beside." * 

Examples of this "consciousness of the presence 
of God" abound throughout the history of mysticism, 
but I shall quote only a few passages illustrating it 
from the almost endless number with which the 
mystical books are filled. "Sometimes," says St. 
Teresa, "when I was reading I came suddenly upon 
a sense of the presence of God which did not allow 
me to doubt that He was within me and that I was 
entirely engulfed in Him." " Being in prayer on the 
Festival of the glorious St. Peter, I saw close to me, 
or rather felt — for I saw nothing with either the eyes 
of the body or those of the soul — but it seemed to 
me that Christ was beside me, and I saw that it was 
He Himself who was speaking to me, at least so it 
appeared to me." 2 



1 "Fioretti," p. 4. 

2 Quoted from the "Vie de St. Teresa," by Mrs. Graham, in 
her "Santa Teresa," pp. 144 and 169. 



THREE PHASES OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF 1 65 

Madame Guyon describes her experience thus: 
"My spirit, disenthralled from selfishness, became 
united with and lost in God, its Sovereign, who at- 
tracted it more and more to Himself. And this was 
so much the case, that I could seem to see and know 
God only and not myself. ... It was thus that 
my soul was lost in God, who communicated to it 
His qualities, having drawn it out of all that it had of 
its own. ... O happy poverty, happy loss, happy 
nothing, which gives no less than God Himself in His 
own immensity — no more circumscribed to the 
limited manner of creation, but always drawing it out 
of that to plunge it wholly into His divine Essence." 1 

" In this embrace and essential unity with God," 
writes Ruysbroek, " all devout and inward spirits 
are one with God by living immersion and melting 
away into Him ; they are by grace one and the same 
thing with Him, because the same essence is in both." 
"For what we are, that we intently contemplate; 
and what we contemplate, that we are ; for our mind, 
our life, and our essence are simply lifted up and 
united to the very truth, which is God. Wherefore 
in this simple and intent contemplation we are one 
life and one spirit with God. . . . In this highest stage 
the soul is united to God without means ; it sinks 
into the vast darkness of Godhead." 2 

At such times, according to Bernard of Clairvaux, 

1 Quoted by Vaughn, "Hours with the Mystics," Vol. II, 
p. 228. 

2 Quoted by Inge, " Christian Mysticism," p. 170. 



1 66 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

the soul knows itself to be lost in God. " As the 
little drop of water when poured into a quantity of 
wine appears to surrender its own nature and takes 
on both the taste and the color of the wine, . . . 
and as the air when shot through by the sunbeam is 
transformed into the brightness of the light, so that 
it seems not so much to be illuminated as to be the 
very light itself; so does the human consciousness, 
in some ineffable way, then flow into the divine 
and empty itself completely into the will of 
God." x 

The reader of Emerson will be reminded by this of 
the essay on the "Over-Soul." "From within or 
from behind, a light shines through us upon things 
and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light 
is all." " As there is no screen or ceiling between our 
heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or 
wall in the soul, where man, the effect, ceases, and 
God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away. 
We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual 
nature, to the attributes of God." "For this com- 
munication is an efflux of the Divine Mind into our 
mind. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet before 
the flowing surges of the sea of life." 2 

The same greater Life Jacob Behmen describes as 
having slowly grown up within him. "It opened 
itself to me from time to time as in a young Plant; 



1 Quoted by Preger, "Deutsche Mystik," Vol. I, p. 226. 

2 Works, Vol. II, pp. 270, 271, 281. 



THREE PHASES OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF 167 

though the same was in me for the space of twelve 
years, and it was as it were breeding." * 

The " Imitation of Christ" is filled with the same 
spirit. "For Thou, O Lord God, art above all in all 
perfection. . . . Thou art most sweet and most 
abundantly comforting. . . . Therefore, whatever 
Thou bestowest on me, that is not Thyself ; whatever 
Thou revealest or promisest, while I am not permitted 
truly to behold and enjoy Thee, is insufficient to fill 
the boundless desire of my soul, which, stretching 
beyond all creatures, and even beyond all gifts, 
can only be satisfied in union with Thy all-perfect 
spirit." 2 

Tauler makes use of exactly the same figures of 
speech that we found in Bernard — the drop of water 
lost in the wine, the light permeating the air — to 
describe his own experience of union with the en- 
veloping life which he called sometimes God, some- 
times the "Ungeschaffener Abgrund," the Uncreated 
Abyss. The deeps of the human soul lead directly 
into the divine Deep. "The created abyss leads into 
the Uncreated Abyss, and the two abysses become a 
single unit, an unmixed, divine Being. The human 
spirit loses itself in the Spirit of God, it is plunged 
in the bottomless Sea." 3 

1 "Works," English translation, by William Law, p. xv. 

2 Payne's translation, p. 206. 

3 No translation is able to give the music of the original German, 
which I therefore append: "Der Abgrund der geschaffen ist, 
fuhrt in dem ungeschaffenen Abgrund, und die zwei Abgriinde 
werden ein einiges Eins, ein lauteres, gottliches Wesen, und da 



1 68 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

I have already quoted from Emerson in this con- 
nection. To some it may seem strange to find the 
ultra Unitarian of the nineteenth century in America 
placed side by side with Teresa and John of the 
Cross. Yet, though differing so widely in externals, 
they are all really one at heart. It is the spirit that 
unifieth; and all the mystics will be found at last 
to speak the same language. Not one of them but 
feels that the deepest reality of life is an experience 
like that to which Emerson refers at the close of his 
great essay. "Ineffable is the union of man and God 
in every act of the soul. The simplest person who in 
his integrity worships God, becomes God ; yet for- 
ever and ever the influx of this better and universal 
self is new and unsearchable." "The soul gives itself 
alone, original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original, 
and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, 
leads, and speaks through it. Then is it glad, 
young, and nimble. It is not wise, but it sees through 
all things. It is not religious, but it is innocent. It 
calls the light its own, and feels that the grass grows 
and the stone falls by a law inferior to, and depend- 
ent on, its nature. Behold, it saith, I am born into 
the great, the universal mind. I, the imperfect, 
adore my own Perfect. I am somehow receptive 
of the great soul, and thereby I do overlook the sun 
and the stars and feel them to be the fair accidents 
and effects which change and pass. More and more 

hat sich der Geist in dem Geist Gottes verloren, in dem grund- 
lossen Meer ist er ertrunken." Quoted by Preger, Vol. Ill, p. 219. 



THREE PHASES OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF 1 69 

the surges of the everlasting nature enter into me, 
and I become public and human in my regards and 
actions. So come I to live in thoughts and act with 
energies which are immortal." * 

Another modern mystic who, though also far re- 
moved in many ways from the saints of the Middle 
Ages, belongs with them in spirit, is Walt Whitman. 
No one differs from them in outer form much more 
than he, and yet it is impossible to read his later 
poems without seeing in them, under many an 
unusual appellation, repeated references to the same 
unspeakable presence which Eckhart called the 
"Stille Wliste" and Tauler the " Ungeschaffener 
Abgrund." The absence of all theological termi- 
nology and the lack of any sort of reliance on priest 
or church take away none of the strength of his 
immediate certainty. 

" Ah more than any priest, O soul, we too believe in God, 
But with the mystery of God we dare not dally. 

soul, thou pleasest me, I thee, 

Sailing these seas or on the hills, or waking in the night, 
Thoughts, silent thoughts, of Time and Space and Death, 

like waters flowing, 
Bear me indeed as through the regions infinite, 
Whose air I breathe, whose ripples hear, lave me all over, 
Bathe me, O God, in thee, mounting to thee, 

1 and my soul to range in range of thee. 

O thou transcendent, 

Nameless, the fibre and the breath, 

1 From "The Over-Soul"; Works, Vol, II, pp. 292, 296-297. 



1 70 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

Light of the light, shedding forth universes, thou centre of 

them, 
Thou mightier centre of the true, the good, the loving, 
Thou moral, spiritual fountain — affection's source — thou 

reservoir, 
(O pensive soul of me — O thirst unsatisfied — waitest not 

there ? 
Waitest not haply for us somewhere there the Comrade 

perfect ?) 
Thou pulse — thou motive of the stars, suns, systems, 
That, circling, move in order, safe, harmonious, 
Athwart the shapeless vastnesses of space, 
How should I think, how breathe a single breath, how speak, 

if out of myself, 
I could not launch, to those superior universes? 

Swiftly I shrivel at the thought of God, 

At Nature and its wonders, Time and Space and Death, 

But that I, turning, call to thee, O soul, thou actual Me, 

And lo, thou gently masterest the orbs, 

Thou matest Time, smilest content at Death, 

And fillest, swellest full the vastnesses of Space." x 

"Our lives," says Maeterlinck, "must be spent 
seeking our God, for God hides; but His artifices, 
once they be known, seem so simple and smiling ! 
From that moment the merest nothing reveals His 
presence, and the greatness of our life depends on 
so little!" 2 

The experiences of the mystic are always taken, 
and apparently have to be taken, at their face value. 
They are not data from which one reasons, but ex- 

1 From "Passage to India," "Leaves of Grass," p. 321* 

2 "Le Tresor des Humbles," p. 270. 



THREE PHASES OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF 171 

periences of immediate certainty. Of the more fan- 
tastic visions the mystic may indeed have many 
doubts — witness St. Teresa, who never seems to 
have fully settled it in her own mind whether certain 
of her visions were of divine or of diabolical origin. 
In such cases the mystic may use the pragmatic test 
and consider the result of the vision upon life. But 
in the case of the less fantastic and more deep-lying 
experiences no proof or test is resorted to, for the 
mystic is absolutely convinced that he has been in 
communion with his God. In the fifth "Abode" 
of the Interior Castle, says St. Teresa, " God estab- 
lishes himself within one's soul in such a way that, 
when the soul returns to itself, it is impossible for it 
to doubt that it has been in God and God in it ; and 
this conviction remains so firmly imprinted upon one 
that if one should go for many years without being 
raised anew to this blessed state he could still never 
forget the favor once received, nor doubt of its 
reality." x 

"The spiritual life," writes a modern mystic, 
"justifies itself to those who live it. . . . It is a 
life whose experiences are proved real to their pos- 
sessor, because they remain with him when brought 
closest into contact with the objective realities of life. 
Dreams cannot stand this test. We wake from 
them to find they are but dreams. Wanderings of 
an overwrought brain do not stand this test. These 

1 (Euvres, French translation by Bouix, Vol. Ill, p. 459. 



172 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

highest experiences that I have had of God's presence 
have been rare and brief — flashes of consciousness 
which have compelled me to exclaim with surprise, 
God is here ! or conditions of exaltation and insight 
less intense and only gradually passing away. I 
have severely questioned the worth of these moments. 
To no soul have I named them, lest I should be 
building my. life and work on mere fantasies of 
the brain. But I find that after every questioning 
and test, they stand out to-day as the most real ex- 
periences of my life, and experiences which have 
explained and justified and unified all past expe- 
riences and all past growth. Indeed their reality 
and their far-reaching significance are ever becoming 
more clear and evident." * 

To quote from still another modern mystic: 
"The vision lasted a few seconds and was gone; 
but the memory of it and the sense of the reality of 
what it taught has remained during the quarter of a 
century which has since elapsed. I knew that what 
the vision showed was true. I had attained to a point 
of view from which I saw that it must be true. That 
view, that conviction, I may say that consciousness, 
has never, even during periods of deepest depression, 
been lost." 2 

To say that after such an experience the mystic 
is absolutely certain of the existence of God would 
be an absurd understatement. Even by reasoning 

1 J. Trevor, quoted by Professor James, "Varieties," p. 397. 

2 From Dr. Bucke, in his "Cosmic Consciousness." 



THREE PHASES OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF 1 73 

alone some people may become perfectly convinced 
of God's existence. But to the mystic God becomes 
the most real and the most immediately known of all 
beings. "I am as certain as that I live," says Eck- 
hart, ''that nothing is so near to me as God. God is 
nearer to me than I am to myself." * 

The strength of this certainty can be estimated 
by no ordinary standard. It is seen best in the trans- 
formation and reversal of all the values and conven- 
tions of life in the eyes of the mystic. The standards 
of this world are discredited, and the man lives in 
the light of his mystical experiences. "Such is the 
sweetness of deep delight of these touches of God," 
says John Yepes, "that one of them is more than a 
recompense for all the sufferings of this life, however 
great their number." One glimpse into the mystic 
world transforms one's entire Weltanschauung. Few 
indeed, says Tauler, are those who attain to this new 
vision ; but to those who do, however short a time it 
last, the glimpse approves itself as an eternity. To 
such as have once gained this vision heaven and earth 
are as nothing — "ein lauteres Nichts." 

Ill 

In the England of the eighteenth century there was 
little enough mysticism. William Law is the excep- 
tion which (by a misuse of the proverb) would be 
said to "prove the rule." It was an age of ration- 

1 Op. cit., p. 96. 



174 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

alism, in which every belief must be established by 
arguments or be ruled out of court. Mysticism and in 
general all influence of feeling upon belief was out of 
favor and even an object of contempt in this sane and 
sober age, as is seen from what the accepted prophet 
of the time has to say about " enthusiasm." "In all 
ages," says John Locke, "men in whom melancholy 
has mixed with devotion, or whose conceit of them- 
selves has raised them into an opinion of a greater 
familiarity with God, and a nearer admittance to his 
favor than is afforded to others, have often flattered 
themselves with a persuasion of an immediate inter- 
course with the Deity, and frequent communications 
from the Divine Spirit. . . . This I take to be properly 
enthusiasm, which though founded neither on reason 
nor divine revelation, but rising from the conceits 
of a warmed or overweening brain, works yet, where 
it gets a footing, more powerfully on the persuasions 
and actions of men than either of those two 
or both together; men being most forwardly 
obedient to the impulses they receive from them- 
selves." * 

If on this negative side John Locke was the mouth- 
piece of his age, on the positive side of his teaching he 
was no less so. In him both the deists and the ortho- 
dox party saw their great champion. Nor was this 
so strange as it may at first seem ; for, opposed as 
these two parties in many ways were, they joined 

1 "Essay concerning Human Understanding," Bk. IV, Chap. 
19. 



• THREE PHASES OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF 1 75 

forces as to the one point for which John Locke 
in religious matters stood ; namely, the use of the 
reason as the ultimate basis of belief. The eigh- 
teenth century in England was the age of the Reli- 
gion of the Understanding; its two great factions 
both based their faith on arguments, and differed 
merely in the choice of the arguments on which that 
faith should be based. 

Nearly all thinkers were agreed that the existence 
of God could be absolutely demonstrated even 
without the help of revelation. Thus, Locke tells 
us that God's existence is "the most obvious 
truth that reason discovers, " and that its evidence is 
"equal to mathematical certainty." 1 The argu- 
ments chiefly relied upon were the cosmological and 
teleological, though Clarke also made use of the 
ontological proof in his lectures on the Boyle founda- 
tion — a lectureship, by the way, most typical of the 
times, founded by the great chemist for the purpose 
of proving the truth of the Christian religion 
against atheists, deists, heathen, Jews, and Moham- 
medans. 

The cosmological argument is clearly set forth by 
Locke. 2 He starts with the existence of the finite 
self and argues that, since it is not eternal and did 
not create itself, and since "bare nothing" cannot 
produce anything, there must have been something 
existent from all eternity, and this something must 

1 "Essay," Bk. IV, Chap. 10. 

2 Loc. cit. 



Ij6 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

have been both intelligent and most powerful in order 
to have produced intelligent beings. The argument 
from design is used in greatest detail by Derham in 
his Boyle lectures of 1711 and 1712, in which the 
entire universe, from the sun and the earth to the 
intestinal glands of the smallest animals, is laid 
under contribution to produce marks of design and 
contrivance. 1 Nor had the deists any criticisms to 
make upon these orthodox attempts to demonstrate 
the existence of God. So obvious to the reason, in 
fact, did they consider this to be that, as a rule, they 
quite took '^ for granted, as not to be doubted by any 
rational being. That religious faith must be based 
on reason and on it alone is their oft-reiterated asser- 
tion. " We hold," says Toland, 2 "that Reason is the 
only Foundation of all Certitude." "All Faith 
now in the world is . . . entirely built upon Rati- 
ocination." Matthew Tindal, the consummation of 
Deism, in like manner takes the existence of God quite 
for granted, as demonstrated to the reason of every 
thinking man, and insists that the truths of Chris- 
tianity are only the truths of natural reason and hence 
are as "Old as Creation," and that the Gospel 
was merely "a republication of the Religion of 
Nature." 

1 " Physico-Theology, or a Demonstration of the Being and 
Atrtibutes of God from his Works of Creation." 

2 The title of his book is itself significant: "Christianity not 
Mysterious, or a Treatise showing that there is Nothing in the 
Gospel contrary to Reason nor above it." The passages her§ 
cited are from pp. 6 and 127. 



THREE PHASES OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF 1 77 

What divided the two parties of thought was the 
question of the relative values to be assigned to the 
arguments from authority and those from revelation. 
Here, again, Locke, though regarded somewhat sus- 
piciously by some of his contemporaries, came more 
than any one else to be the spokesman of the age. 
The argument from divine revelation, according to 
him, is perfectly valid and must be regarded as abso- 
lute proof, but it lies always with the reason to de- 
termine what is and what is not such a revelation. 
If the authoritative passage conflicts with reason, it 
cannot be accepted; if, on the contrary, though 
seemingly unlikely it is perfectly possible and rational 
and is "an evident revelation," it must be admitted. 
The assertions of the Bible, for instance, being wit- 
nessed to by signs and wonders, — such as the burn- 
ing bush, the rod turned into a serpent, etc., — are 
sufficiently and conclusively proven to have been of 
divine authority. 

Revelation, then, can never be the sole basis of 
faith, for in any case reason is the final court of ap- 
peal, and a belief based on revelation is therefore 
no more unreasoned than one based on the testi- 
mony of witnesses which one has a perfect right to 
examine critically. It is merely a question of 
evidence. 

Toland adopts much the same view. There are, ac- 
cording to him, four sources of information : (1) the 
experience of the senses, (2) the experience of the 
mind, (3) human authority or revelation, (4) divine 



178 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

authority or revelation, — one of them being quite 
as reasonable a basis for belief as another, and faith 
being "a most firm Persuasion built upon substan- 
tial Reasons." 1 

Some of the deists were not so willing to accept 
the supernatural elements of the Bible as were Locke 
and Toland, and to crush out this spark of skep- 
ticism and to demonstrate to the satisfaction of the 
reason for all time the absolute trustworthiness of 
the Scriptures as the basis of a rational faith, Leslie 
brought forth his "Short and Easy Method with the 
Deists." "He proposed to lay down a test so sim- 
ple, unequivocal, and easy of application, that doubt 
should be henceforth impossible to the candid in- 
quirer. The test proposed . . . was expressed in 
four rules destined to try the truth of alleged matters 
of fact. They are expressed as follows : ' First, 
That the matter of fact be such, as that men's out- 
ward senses, their eyes and ears, may be judges of it. 
Second, That it be done publicly, in the face of the 
world. Third, That not only public monuments be 
kept up in honor of it, but some outward actions to 
be performed. Fourth, That such monuments or such 
observances be instituted and do commence from the 
time the matter of fact was done.' The first two 
rules, he says, make deception impossible at the 
time ; the last two make it impossible at any subse- 
quent period. The application of these tests estab- 
lishes the truth of the Mosaic records and of the 

1 "Christianity not Mysterious," pp. 16-18 and 132. 



THREE PHASES OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF 1 79 

Gospels ; and establishes equally the falsehood of the 
Mohammedan religion." 1 

The man who went farthest in his reliance upon 
the argument from authority was Waterland, who 
tried to show that Clarke's a priori demonstration 
of God's existence would not hold, and insisted that 
the historical argument was the only proper one, and 
that men should accept and be content with whatever 
was demonstrated to them by divine authority con- 
firmed with miracles. 

But spite of Waterland's exegesis and Leslie's 
short and easy method, there was a growing tendency 
to use discrimination in acceptance of the super- 
natural and to put constantly less trust in the argu- 
ment from authority. Whist on in 1722 published 
his "Essay toward restoring the true Text of the Old 
Testament," in which he tried to show that since the 
time of Christ numerous errors had crept into the 
Old Testament prophecies, and at the same time 
attacked the allegorical method of interpretation. 
Collins, in criticising Whiston's views, showed that 
if the authority of Christianity was to be based on 
the fulfillment of prophecy, the allegorical method 
must be retained and extended, but at the same time 
pointed out the unsatisfactory nature of such a sup- 
port. Woolston furiously attacked the miraculous 
element in the Scripture, insisting on an allegorical 
interpretation even of the resurrection of Christ; 

1 Leslie Stephen, "English Thought in the Eighteenth Cen- 
tury," p. 196. 



180 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

while Tindal maintained that revelation could add 
nothing to the teachings of "natural" or rational 
religion. The most wholesale attack upon the au- 
thority of the Bible was made by Morgan, who 
declared that the entire Old Testament was of purely 
human origin and that the Jehovah of the Jews was 
in no way identical with the God of the Christians. 
But the attack upon the historical argument which 
was really the most serious and vital, was that made 
by Middleton, who, not content, as the others had 
been, with refusing credence to some particular part 
of the Scripture, opened up the whole question as to 
whether there really was any such thing as literal 
inspiration at all, and insisted that the books of the 
Canon should be subject to the same sort of historical 
criticism as other writings. 1 

With Middleton Deism came to an end. The 
deists were not armed with suitable methods of 
criticism to enable them to place the writings of the 
Old and New Testament in the true light. But the 
spirit of Deism — so far as it was a desire to get at 
the truth about the canonical books, irrespective 
of authority and of men's opinions — lived on in the 
students of the textual and higher criticism, and 
merely changed its field of operations, temporarily, 
from England to the Continent. As early as 1670 
Spinoza, in his "Tractatus Theologico-politicus,"had 

1 Beside Locke, Toland, Derham, and Tindal, my authorities 
for this period are Lechler's " Geschichte der Englischen Deis- 
mus," and Stephen's "English Thought in the Eighteenth 
Century," also Windelband and Falckenberg. 



THREE PHASES OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF l8l 

pointed out that Moses could not have been the author 
of the Pentateuch. This work was the beginning of 
a truly scientific and critical study of the Scripture, 
which, by slow but steady progress, in the hands of 
such men as Vitringa, Astruc, Lowth, Eichhorn, 
Geddes, Ewald, Graf, Kuenen, Wellhausen, and 
others, has little by little broken down the traditional 
view of the literal inspiration of the sacred writings, 
and step by step has built up a new view of them, 
as purely human documents which record, not the 
direct revelations of a great anthropomorphic king, 
"the high and mighty Ruler of the Universe," but 
rather the gradual development of a people and of 
their religion from very lowly beginnings, up to the 
appearance of Jesus and of Paul. This, of course, 
was not done without a struggle, and the defenders of 
the old view resisted every inch of the ground, but 
the final result was inevitable. In fact, some of the 
severest wounds which the authority of the Bible 
suffered were at the hands of its most enthusiastic 
and headlong defenders. For when in the middle of 
the last century the upholders of orthodoxy found 
themselves attacked, not only by the higher critics, 
but by the natural scientists as well, they deliberately 
took up their stand upon the assertion that if the 
theory of evolution was true the Bible was "false," 
uninspired, and without authority. 1 Spite of the vio- 

1 For a vivid description of this whole contest see the first and 
last chapters of Andrew D. White's "Warfare of Science with 
Theology." 



1 82 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

lent attacks of the theologians, however, the hypothe- 
sis of evolution steadily gained ground, and it soon 
became evident that the oft-repeated proof of the un- 
scriptural nature of Darwinism was a two-edged 
sword that cut both ways. 1 If the Bible had itself 
spoken, it well might have exclaimed, "Save me 
from my friends and I will look out for my enemies !" 
This dangerous and destructive method of defend- 
ing the authority of the Bible, however, has at length 
been given up and the leaders of theological thought 
are often enthusiastic supporters of the evolutionary 
theory of creation and of the general view of the 
Scriptures adopted by the higher criticism. The 
days are forever past when the Bible could be re- 
garded as written by the finger of Jehovah or sent down 
from Heaven (as the Koran) in sections to certain 
holy men of old. The doctrine of literal inspiration 
has been practically (if not in theory) discarded by 
all but the most conservative. The Bible is seen by 
nearly all to be one of the most human of books. 
The advocates of the "New Theology" insist that 
this change of view is no loss to religion, but a gain. 
And doubtless this is so; in these critical days a 
fallacious argument cannot long support a belief, 

1 This is but a typical example of that irony of fate which often 
makes the unwise defenders of a theological cause its most dan- 
gerous, though unwilling, enemies. The attack on Darwinism 
was not the first case. "It would hardly be an exaggeration to 
say that the naturalism of to-day is the logical outcome of the 
natural theology of a century ago." (Ward's "Naturalism and 
Agnosticism," Vol. I, p. 48.) 



THREE PHASES OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF 1 83 

and the sooner one recognizes its weakness the better. 
And yet it cannot be denied that, along with the old 
view of the authority of the Bible, has gone one of the 
strongest bases for the popular belief in God. I 
speak here as if its direct authority had already passed 
away, because, although a large part of the present 
generation still clings to it, it has lost all hold on the 
leaders of thought and is certainly destined before 
very many years to become one of the curiosities of 
the past. When one considers the tremendous 
change in the general attitude toward literal inspira- 
tion that has taken place both in this country and in 
England during the past thirty years, one hesitates 
to set any limits to the progress which this same tend- 
ency may make in the next thirty. The argument 
for the existence of God from the absolute authority 
of the Bible was, of course, always exceedingly illogi- 
cal, and involved a petitio principii from the very 
start; but that did not prevent it from having tre- 
mendous weight with the popular mind. Hence, 
no matter how joyfully one may welcome a more 
rational view of the Scriptures, one must still recog- 
nize the fact that the popular belief in God, in losing 
the argument from authority, has lost — or at 
least is destined to lose — one of its strongest 
bases. 

Nor have the other arguments of the Religion of 
Thought fared so very much better. As the onto- 
logical proof never had any influence on religion 
and belonged only to the philosophic few, not to the 



184 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

people, I shall not touch upon it here, nor discuss 
the question whether or not Kant satisfactorily and 
forever refuted it. 1 But the cosmological and (espe- 
cially) the teleological arguments have been of con- 
siderable importance to religious belief, and their 
fate must be briefly considered. The form of the 
cosmological argument which Kant attacked was not 
the popular, but the scholastic form, and the God it 
sought to prove was not the popular, but the scholas- 
tic God. Nevertheless Kant's reasoning holds of the 
former as well as of the latter. 2 A typical example 
of the more popular form of the cosmological proof 
is that of Locke, to which reference was made a 
few pages back. That such an argument will not 
hold in the face of Kant's criticism must be evident 
to all. In the first place, it never forces one to 
admit the existence of "Something eternal" at all; 
for there is nothing contradictory in the concept of 
an infinite regress of finite beings ; there is no one 
place in the chain rather than another at which we 
are forced to stop ; there is no way of forcing reason 
into the acceptance of a "Great First Cause," in 
the sense in which this term is commonly used. 
But even if we grant that the argument has demon- 
strated the existence of a necessary Being, an eternal 
Something, it has by no means led us to the kind of 
Being that the argument set out to prove, or that rcli- 

1 See the " Kritik der reinen Vernunft" (Kirchmann's Edition), 
pp. 512-510. 

2 Ibid., pp. 520-532. 



THREE PHASES OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF 1 85 

gion demands. To assert that this necessary Being 
— which for all the argument shows may be just the 
world itself — is " God " in any ordinary sense of that 
term, is an immense and utterly unwarranted assump- 
tion. And conversely, the kind of God that those 
desire who commonly make use of the popular form 
of the cosmological argument — a Being who is in 
the world and a part of it, and who acts upon it in the 
way of causation — such a Being can never satisfy 
the argument. For God in this sense is a part of the 
phenomenal order and therefore requires explanation 
as much as any other link in the chain. We are no 
more forced to stop with Him than with any other 
part — in fact, on the fundamental assumption of the 
cosmological proof, that every phenomenal being 
demands an explanation, we are driven beyond and 
back of Him. If, now, it be asserted that His nature 
is such that we are forced to stop with Him and to 
consider Him as containing his own necessity within 
Himself, this, as Kant shows, can be demonstrated 
only by recourse to the ontological argument; that 
is to say, it can be proved only by showing that the 
concept of God is such as necessarily to imply His 
existence; and whatever may be said of this latter 
form of reasoning, certain it is that it can never con- 
stitute a basis of popular belief, but must forever 
remain in the region of philosophy, not of religion. 
The influence of the cosmological proof itself, 
however, has never been very great, and in losing it 
religious belief has suffered no very serious blow. 



1 86 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

But when we come to deal with the teleological proof, 
we have a much more vital question to face. For, next 
to the argument from authority, the evidences of 
design in nature and in history have, as a rule, formed 
the chief intellectual stay of popular belief. 

Kant's refutation of the " physico-theological 
proof" in its present form * is not a direct answer to 
the popular reasoning, for it was directed against 
the scholastic, not against the popular and religious 
concept of God. The argument as commonly used 
may best be considered under two heads, one of 
which aims to prove design in nature, the other 
Providence in history. 

The "design argument," as Kant has said, "will 
always deserve to be treated with respect. It is the 
oldest, the clearest, and most in conformity with hu- 
man reason." 2 So obvious is it that it forces itself 
upon every one's attention; so easily does it adapt 
itself to minds of different caliber that, as Hume 
observed, philosophers make use of it to prove the ex- 
istence of God from the universality of law, and 
the unphilosophic use it to prove the same thesis 
by the interruptions of law. Its defenders range 
from geniuses such as Martineau, through Paley, 
with his watch and his human anatomy, down to 
the Rev. Mr. Derham, mentioned a few pages back, 
who demonstrates divine contrivance and design by 
the fact that pernicious animals produce fewer young 

1 Ibid., pp. 53 2 -539- 

2 Ibid., p. 534. 



THREE PHASES OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF 1 87 

than do useful animals, and by the " prodigeous 
Bulk" of the Globe ("a work too grand for anything 
less than a God to make"), and who proves the exist- 
ence of an All-merciful Designer by means of the 
mouths of certain birds and insects which are cun- 
ningly contrived "to catch, hold, and tear their Prey," 
and "to pierce and wound Animals and suck their 
Blood." * 

For the purposes of this argument the phenomena 
of nature may be divided into three classes. The first 
is made up of those objects which, like the eye, seem 
to lead by a real induction to the hypothesis of an 
intelligent designer. The parts of the eye, as Mill 2 
has pointed out, have one and only one circumstance 
in common, namely, the property of conducing to 
sight. Tins property should, therefore, according 
to the Principle of Single Agreement, be considered 
the cause of the eye. But since sight comes subse- 
quent to the formation of the eye, the idea of sight 
in the mind of an intelligent and purposeful Creator 
must be considered the cause, — unless it can in some 
other way be accounted for. Unfortunately for the 
design argument, however, the hypothesis of natural 
selection has, since Mill's day, won constantly wider 
and more general acceptance, and no biologist of to- 
day looks to special divine contrivance as an explana- 
tion of the formation of the eye. It may well be, in- 
deed, that natural selection is only God's way of 

1 "Physico-Theology," pp. 170 and 192. 

2 "Three Essays on Religion," pp. 170-172. 



1 88 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

doing things, and certainly there is nothing in the 
evolutionary hypothesis inconsistent with divine crea- 
tion. And yet, though all this is true, we cannot deny 
the fact that since 1859 the design argument has 
suffered a very severe blow. Evolution certainly 
does not refute design ; but we can no longer prove 
design by appeal to particular facts, such as the form 
of the eye, which since Darwin's time are perfectly 
explicable without making use of a supernatural 
hypothesis. 

Teleology, therefore, is forced to take on a more 
universal form and to retreat to the second of the 
classes of phenomena referred to, — namely, all 
those things which seem, in a general way, to resemble 
the artificial creations of man, and hence to imply 
contrivance and an intelligent Creator. But, un- 
fortunately, while the resemblance between these 
things and human productions is sufficient to suggest 
design, the suggestion is only one of analogy, not of 
a true induction, and the difference between them 
and the creations of art is so great that the assumption 
of a Creator with purposes like ours (if based on this 
similarity alone) is utterly unwarranted. 

The third class of objects referred to is the great 
mass of phenomena which show no marks of design 
whatever or which seem, if contrived at all, to be the 
work of a Power very different from any we should 
like to claim as a God. These are the facts which 
somehow fail to be mentioned even in such encyclo- 
paedic catalogues of the universe as the books of 



THREE PHASES OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF 1 89 

Derham and Paley. The suffering of animals and 
of the innocent, the almost insurmountable evil in- 
fluences that have surrounded most of the race, are 
examples of what I mean. This world is certainly 
a very different place from what one would expect 
from a priori considerations on the hypothesis of a 
"good God." 

" What is this separate Nature so unnatural ? 
What is this earth to our affections (unloving earth, without 

a throb to answer ours, 
Cold earth, the place of graves) ? " 

" Ah Love ! could you and I with Him conspire 
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, 
Would we not shatter it to bits — and then 
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire ! " 

The upholders of the design argument usually make 
light of the unwelcome things, or shut their eyes to 
them altogether, and pick their facts. But the whole 
of known reality must be faced if we are to take the 
problem seriously. 

But, granting for the moment that the design argu- 
ment has proved a Designer, what sort of Being is 
He ? If we face all the given facts and try by induc- 
tion from them to determine His character, can we 
in any sense be said to have proved the kind of God 
that religion wants? If we limit ourselves to this 
one argument, is not Mill's conclusion even too gen- 
erous? — " a Being of great but Hmited power, how 
or by what limited we cannot even conjecture ; of 



190 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

great and perhaps unlimited intelligence, but perhaps 
also more limited than is his power ; who desires and 
pays some regard to the happiness of his creatures, 
but who seems to have other motives of action which 
he cares more for, and who can hardly be supposed 
to have created the universe for that purpose alone.' ' * 
In Hume's words, by this argument one "is able, 
perhaps, to assert, or conjecture, that the universe, 
sometime, arose from something like design; but 
beyond that position he cannot ascertain one single 
circumstance." 2 

If I should leave the teleological argument at this 
point, I should indeed be doing it injustice ; for that 
presentation of it which starts, not from particular 
acts but from the prevalence of law, the universality 
of order, is not open to the criticism I have made upon 
the more popular forms. The existence everywhere 
of order is certainly one of the most striking char- 
acteristics of the universe as we know it and one 
which strongly suggests that rationality lies very deep 
in the heart of things. Still I must insist that even 
this feature of the Cosmos fails to demonstrate any- 
thing very definite, and that if we depend entirely 
upon it, or upon any other empirical argument, we 
can never reach the kind of God that religion de- 
mands. 

After what has been said of the argument from 

1 "Three Essays on Religion," p. 194. 

2 "Dialogues concerning Natural Religion," p. in. Cf. also 
Spinoza, "Ethic," Bk. I, Appendix. 



THREE PHASES OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF 191 

design in nature, little need be added as to divine 
purpose in history. Doubtless we may find it there 

— any amount of it — for he that seeketh findeth, 
and the "Philosophy of History" may be made to 
prove anything. But if we should go to history 
without a theological thesis to support, and merely try 
to determine by an inductive study what it indicates 
as to a Guiding Power, we should hardly be led to 
belief in the kind of God that religion teaches. At 
most we could only argue to a benevolent but ex- 
ceedingly limited and constantly baffled Being, or to 
one who is indeed most powerful but in his purposes 
most strange, who wills all the circumstances of the 
great game of life, and aims deliberately at the most 
atrocious and repulsive events as well as at the noble 
and sublime. The rain falls on the evil and on the 
good. One does not have to be old to know that the 
righteous are often forsaken, while the wicked 
flourish like a green bay tree. "The blood of the 
martyrs" is by no means always "the seed of the 
Church." It is the victors who write the histories 

— the vanquished leave no testimony as to how in 
their opinion events should be interpreted. The 
offerings of those who perished in the sea are not hung 
up in the temple of Poseidon. Josiah, the devout 
servant of Jehovah, goes out in the strength of his 
Lord to fight the Egyptians, and is slain at Megiddo. 
Rhipeus of Troy seemed to all the justest of men and 
the most worthy of success ; but dis aliter visum — 
"to the gods it seemed otherwise." No more pro- 



192 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

found words were ever written by the great Roman 
poet. The cause of justice goes often to the wall. 
Might repeatedly makes right. The cause which we 
men to the best of our lights must needs consider the 
cause of Providence, if there be a Providence, is often 
crushed. Across every page of history we find 
written dis aliter visum. 

It may be that Longfellow's lines are right, that 
" behind the great Unknown standeth God." It 
may be merely the fault of our human blindness that 
we cannot distinguish the true course of the divine 
plan. Yet certain it is that if we are ever to see that 
plan or to believe in the God within the shadow, we 
must get that belief from some other source than an 
inductive argument from this hurly-burly world of 
nature and of history. I do not deny that the "eye 
of faith" may still see, and rightly see, God's finger 
in the events of the world, nor that the religious heart 
may still exclaim, "The heavens declare the glory 
of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork." 
But it must be remembered that this is possible only 
after God has been found in some other way than as 
an explanation of the heavens and the firmament. 

In short, the point I wish to make is that belief 
in God as an explanation of things capable of appeal- 
ing to the popular religious mind, is dying. We can- 
not shut our eyes to the fact that the higher criticism 
and the Darwinian theory have made tremendous 
inroads upon the faith of the people so far as this is 
based upon reasoning, and that all the indications 



THREE PHASES OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF 1 93 

make it seem likely that the changes in popular reli- 
gious thought which have already taken place, owing 
to these two influences, are almost insignificant in 
comparison with those which we shall see in the next 
few decades. The physical sciences, which have 
so great an influence over popular thought, have long 
since ceased to make use of the idea of a God ; La 
Place's reply to Napoleon — "Sire, we have no 
longer any need of that hypothesis" — is no more 
regarded as anything unnatural or improper. And 
at the rate of twentieth century progress, it takes 
only a few years for the scientific view to become the 
popular one. 

IV 

In these last four chapters I have attempted to trace 
in outline the general course of religious belief from 
the savage state up to contemporary Christianity. 
We have seen how belief in the divine was at first 
based on authority and strengthened by the imme- 
diate perceptions of the savage. We have seen this 
source of faith gradually wane and its place taken 
by the logical and reasoning faculty. And now we 
of these latter days have lived to see this second 
basis of belief beginning in its turn to crumble. And, 
indeed, the causes of this we cannot deplore; all 
thoughtful men must certainly rejoice at the spread 
of education and of logical thought. Yet those who 
have the interests of religion at heart must read the 
signs of the times with some concern. We certainly 
o 



194 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

are passing through a great religious crisis. As said 
above, belief in God as upheld chiefly by authority 
is long since dead ; the belief as based on reasoning 
is dying. The authority of the Scriptures in the old 
and literal sense is almost completely overthrown. 
Religion is no longer an alternative to natural science 
in the explanation of the world. The old philosophi- 
cal arguments for the existence of God received their 
death blow at the hands of Kant. Whether those 
proposed since his time and those which are yet to 
be constructed will enjoy a better fate, it is not my 
intention to discuss, for in neither case will they in 
any probability gain any hold upon the people. We 
are faced with this dilemma : the arguments which 
the people can grasp are no longer tenable, while the 
arguments that are tenable — if such there be — 
the people cannot grasp. 

The present situation is one that deserves careful 
attention from every student of religion. Many 
who have studied the signs of the times most deeply 
are convinced that belief in a God, whether true or 
not, is destined in a comparatively short time to be 
given up by all but a very few, if indeed it survive 
at all; that, in short, "The battle of Armageddon 
has been fought — and lost." * And a vast number 
of keen observers doubtless agree with Matthew 
Arnold that the sea of faith is now 

" Retreating to the breath 
Of the night -wind, down the vast edges drear 
And naked shingles of the world." 

1 Dr. Osier, "Science and Immortality," p. 24. 



THREE PHASES OF CHRISTIAN BELIEF 1 95 

Many gods have grown old and died ; has not the 
doomsday of the Christian God come at last ? Bishop 
Callaway tells of the passing of the great god of the 
Zulus, Unkulunkulu. In their own naive account, his 
name "is now like the name of a very old crone, which 
has not the power to do even a little thing for herself, 
but sits continually where she sat in the morning till 
the sun sets. And the children make sport of her, for 
she cannot catch them and flog them, but only talk with 
her mouth. Just so is the name of Unkulunkulu." 
"When the grown people wish to talk privately, it is 
the regular thing to send the children out to call at 
the top of their voices for Unkulunkulu." "He is 
now the means of making sport of children." * 

Is the great God of Christendom on the road to the 
same fate? Is He, too, in the future to become a 
"means of making sport of children"? Is belief in 
God shriveling into senile decay, and destined to die 
the death which so many particular beliefs in par- 
ticular gods have long since died ? 

Before we can answer this question we must reckon 
with the field of vital feeling. What is the real basis 
of religious belief to-day ? Is the faith of the people 
based on arguments or on inner experience? How 
far has the Religion of Feeling spread in the religious 
community ? It is questions like these that we must 
consider if we are to gauge the real strength of reli- 
gious belief. And to a consideration of these ques- 
tions we shall now turn in the following chapters. 

1 Quoted by Tylor from Callaway's " Religion of the Amazulu," 
"Primitive Culture," Vol. II, p. 314. 



PART III 

THE PRESENT STATUS OF 
RELIGIOUS BELIEF 



CHAPTER VII 

DEVELOPMENT OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF DURING 
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 

In the last four chapters we have considered, by 
means of typical examples, the development of reli- 
gious belief in the history of the race. From now on 
we must fasten our attention on the individual, and 
more especially, on the individual of our own time 
and country. How does religious belief originate 
with him, and what is the course of its development ? 
Why does the child believe in God, and why does the 
youth continue to believe ? These are the questions 
we must attack in the present chapter. Its scope 
will, therefore, be limited to the periods of child- 
hood and adolescence, — that is, roughly, up to the 
individual's twenty-fifth year, — leaving the beliefs 
of adult life to the following chapter. 

I 

And to begin at the beginning, why does the child, 
in the first place, start believing in God ? To ask 
this question is, of course, to answer it. The child 
believes because he is taught to believe. There are, 
indeed, rare exceptions to this, and it may well be that, 
if we had been left entirely to ourselves as children, 
we should have come of our own motion to some kind 

199 



200 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

of religious belief. Yet as none of us with our full 
quota of senses can be so left to ourselves, the state- 
ment just made comes nearer to absolute universality 
than perhaps any other that could be made on a 
question of religious psychology. A more perfect 
exemplification of the Religion of Primitive Credulity 
it would be impossible to find. The young child 
cannot help believing whatever he is told. For him, 
to hear is to believe. The world of assertions and the 
world of truth have not yet parted company, and 
everything which he sees or hears bears with it neces- 
sarily the tingle of reality. Hence we find that the 
child accepts, as literally as it is possible for him to do, 
whatever he is told. "In every instance that I have 
seen," writes one whose extended acquaintance with 
young children gives her words the weight of au- 
thority, "the baby's theology is a more or less per- 
verted rendering of older teaching. Sometimes it 
is not even perverted and sounds startling and quaint 
only because it translates into blunt words the inef- 
fable crudeness that in the parents' own theology is 
veiled by accepted religious phrases." 1 This, of 
course, is an obvious fact and one that must be noticed 
by all observers of children. As a rule, they simply 
translate into their own language whatever has been 
taught them. 2 

1 Milicent W. Shinn, "Some Comments on Babies," Overland 
Monthly, 2d Series, XXIII, 11. 

2 Thus two children with whom I am acquainted describe 
God as living up in heaven and taking care of us all the time, es- 



DEVELOPMENT OF BELIEF IN YOUTH 201 

Such translation, however, involves the reaction 
of the child's mind upon the material furnished him. 
It is but seldom that the child is capable of appropriat- 
ing the statements made him by adults without recast- 
ing them into a form that shall be for him intelligible. 
The child must think in his own way or not at all, 
and the idea must be made concrete, naive, and 
usually visual, to have any real existence for him. 
He does his best to master and accept whatever his 
parents tell him, but as a rule he succeeds only by 
mixing up with it a good deal of what seems to us 
fantastic imagery. To many children "God is a 
big blue man who pours rain out of big buckets, 
thumps clouds to make thunder, puts the sun and 
moon to bed, takes dead people, birds, and even 
broken dolls up there, distributes babies, and is 
closely related to Santa Claus." * "Lightning is 
God's turning on the gas quick, or (very common) 
striking many matches at once. ... He lights 
the stars so he can see to go on the sidewalk or into 

pecially at night. "He does everything for us and gives us all 
the good things we have." Mr. Chrisman reports a little girl as 
saying, "We must work. The Heaven-Man won't like us if we 
don't work. He knows all we do. We mustn't do naughty 
tricks. We mustn't make faces at the Heaven-Man. He will 
spank us; won't he? . . . God is everybody's papa." ("Religious 
Ideas of a Child," Child Study Monthly, III, 518.) These cases 
are, of course, so typical as to be trite. 

1 G. Stanley Hall, "Child Study: The Basis of Education," 
Forum, XVI, 438. One of my students when a child used to 
think of God as an old man wearing a purple robe and a purple 
tam-o'-shanter. 



202 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

church." l Rather more fantastic, though not excep- 
tionally so, is the following communication from a 
friend of mine : "I remember that between the ages of 
three and seven I thought of God as a hammer up in 
the sky, and Jesus (not Christ) as a sort of candy kiss 
in the shape of two wheels with a bell between like a 
toy I had. Jesus was rolling around near God high 
up among the clouds. I am not quite sure whether 
they had eyes or not, but they were persons. God 
seemed severe and Jesus mild. I cannot account for 
the idea of Jesus, but I think the sound of the hammer 
f ailing on a nail is enough like the sound of the g in 
God to have aroused the association, for I very often 
have that kind of association. I never worshiped 
these symbols or thought of them as very active 
beings, though I had a slight fear of God. I do not 
remember how I thought of Christ, but he was not 
the same to me as Jesus." 

One of the attributes of God most striking to chil- 
dren and most often emphasized in their descrip- 
tions, is His omniscience. Many children picture 
God somewhat as John Fiske did when a boy — 
" a tall, slender man, of aquiline features, wearing 
spectacles, with a pen in his hand and another behind 
his ear," and standing at a desk in the sky noting 
down in a big ledger all the deeds of men. 2 One of 
the children reported by Mr. Barnes says, " God can 

1 G. Stanley Hall, "The Contents of Children's Minds," 
Princeton Review, N. S., XI, 262, 263. 

2 "fhe Idea of God," p. 116. 



DEVELOPMENT OF BELIEF IN YOUTH 203 

see everything you do- and everything you say, even 
if you are inside a house." Another, "I have 
thought and been told that He can see through any- 
thing ; it makes no difference if it is iron, steel, glass, 
wood, or anything." "Many of the children feel that 
God is watching them, and some say, ' He writes it all 
down.'" * An illustration of this which is becoming 
almost classic is the case of the little girl reported 
by Miss Shinn, who, when told that God was always 
watching her, exclaimed that she "would not be 
so tagged." 

That God should be eternal and never should have 
had a beginning is the one point in his parents' teach- 
ing which the child is inclined to accept cum grano 
salts. That He should be old, very old, is indeed cred- 
ible ; but the child tries to make His age, although 
great, at least finite. A little friend of mine, aged 
nine or ten, tells me that " God is awfully old — 
He must be most a hundred." But that there never 
was a time when God did not exist, this seems rather 
too much for a sensible boy to accept. Hence the 
almost universal question, "Who made God?" 
Sully tells of a little boy who, "having learnt from 
his mother that before the world there was only God 
the Creator, asked ' And before God ? ' The mother 
having replied, 'Nothing,' he at once interpreted 
her, answer by saying/ No; there must have been 
the place (i.e., the empty space) where God is.' So 

1 Earl Barnes, "Theological Life of a- California Child," 
Ped. Sent., II, 443. 



204 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

determined is the little mind to get back to the ' be- 
fore,' and to find something, if only a prepared 
place." * 

But the most marked characteristic of God in the 
child's theology is His power. He makes things — 
that is His great distinction. A boy of three years, 
ten months, reported by Sully, "on seeing a group of 
working men returning from their work, asked his 
astonished mother: 'Mama, is these gods?' 'God/ 
retorted his mother, 'why?' 'Because,' he went on, 
'they make houses and churches, Mama, same as 
God makes moons and people and ickle dogs.'" 2 
One of the California children of Barnes's article, a 
girl of eleven, says " God can even go through a key- 
hole, or make himself as small as a pin," and another 
insists that "He could have an earthquake at any 
time." However, Mr. Barnes adds : " God's activities 
are seldom described ; less than five per cent of the 
children speak of Him as ruling the universe, making 
things grow, or caring for our material needs. One 
boy of ten says in perfect earnestness that ' God is 
bossing the world.' But the management of the 
practical things of the world is generally left to the 
angels." 3 

There is, as I have pointed out, a great deal of child- 
ish fantasy mixed up in these early theological ideas ; 
and yet it is obvious that in every case the belief is 

1 "Studies of Childhood," p. 131. 

2 Op. cit., p. 127 

3 Op. cit., p. 443. 



DEVELOPMENT OF BELIEF IN YOUTH 205 

really based ultimately on some kind of authority. 
Most generally it is of course the teaching of parents 
or of Sunday-school that forms the basis for the 
child's belief, but these are by no means the only 
theological authorities for the child. The opinions 
of one's associates, particularly those ideas seldom 
taught or deliberately demonstrated but simply taken 
for granted by the community in which one lives, 
these are of especial influence on the mind of the child. 
In fact almost anything that he sees or hears which 
is in any way relevant to religious questions may be 
to him authoritative. A Punch and Judy show and 
the pictures on deviled ham are mentioned by Mr. 
Barnes as sources coordinate with the hired girl in 
giving rise to religious conceptions. 1 For the child 
almost inevitably accepts as true whatever he sees or 
hears. Absolute trustfulness is his characteristic, 
and belief is to him both natural and necessary. 
Doubt is a category as yet almost entirely foreign to 
him. In short, we may say with President Hall, 
"In childhood credulity amounts almost to hypnotic 
suggestibility." 2 

This reliance on authority, of course, does not end 
with childhood, but it necessarily takes on a different 
tone in later years. The growing individual wakes 
up to the fact that there are inconsistent and warring 
authorities and that it is impossible for him to accept 
them all. Hence many begin to doubt the reliability 

1 Op. cit., p. 448. 

2 "Adolescence," Vol. II, p. 315. 



206 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

of any and every authority ; while many others, owing 
largely to social pressure and the unconscious influ- 
ence of those they look up to, choose one source of au- 
thority, for instance the Bible, as binding for them, 
and regard all other sources of ideas as more or less 
fallible. 

II 

It is, of course, impossible to say at just what age 
the period of childish credulity above described comes 
to an end. It differs with different children. Earl 
Barnes thinks that the tenth year is generally the 
turning point, and in this he is probably right. Still, 
the questioning spirit which finally puts an end to the 
child's naive acceptance of what is told him mani- 
fests itself in many children long before this. Mr. 
Brown, of the State Normal School at Worcester, 
Mass., has made a valuable collection of the sayings 
of children connected with his school, some of which 
bear directly upon the point in question. Thus one 
boy of three, who had apparently been taught that 
God could do everything, asked his father, "If I'd 
gone upstairs could God make it that I hadn't?" 
A boy of five years, eleven months, whose brother 
had just had a fall on the ice, rushed into the house 
saying: "Talk about God's being good ! I should 
think He was good — make all this ice and make T. 
fall down and most kill himself. I should think He 
was good !" A third boy reported by Mr. Brown, 
this one between seven and eight, seems to have done 



DEVELOPMENT OF BELIEF IN YOUTH 207 

some thinking for himself on the subject of the neces- 
sity of prayer. His grandmother had reproved him for 
neglecting to say his prayers the night before, adding, 
" God won't take care of you if you do." To which 
the boy responded, "Well, He did." * This last case 
illustrates one of two leading causes of doubt in the 
mind of the child. Authority begins to lose its hold 
over him when he begins to notice that it is contra- 
dicted by experience. The boy's line of reasoning 
in the last example is plain enough. A conflict 
between authority and experience is not always 
noticed, but when it is, the authority begins to lose 
its power. The other important source of doubt 
in children's minds is a conflict between what they 
are told about God and the ideas of justice and good- 
ness that have been growing up within them. A 
little friend of mine, aged ten, said the other day, 
"Mama, God must have known that Adam and Eve 
would eat that apple, and they couldn't help doing it 
if He planned to have them do it. So why did He 
blame them?" 2 

According to Earl Barnes, the critical spirit cul- 
minates with most children between the ages of 
twelve and fourteen. He bases his conclusions on 

1 H. W. Brown, "Thoughts and Reasonings of Children," 
Ped. Sem., II, 366, 367. 

2 A question such as this is a significant commentary on Cal- 
vinistic theology. How long are we, in the name of religion, to 
fill our children's minds with the details of an outworn creed 
against which both their conscience and their common sense 
revolt ? 



208 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

a study of 1091 compositions of California school 
children from six to twenty years old. "At eleven 
and twelve," he says, "there begin to appear in the 
compositions such phrases as: 'I think,' 'I've been 
told,' 'My idea was,' 'The Bible says,' 'I was taught 
in Sunday-school,' or 'They say.' By thirteen or 
fourteen these phrases become : ' We imagine,' ' I 
used to believe.,' 'I doubt,' etc. A girl of thirteen 
modifies her statements as follows : ' We cannot ex- 
actly tell who is in heaven, but it is supposed that 
every one that serves Him probably goes there.' 
And a girl of twelve thus tries to place the responsi- 
bility for the statement she offers: '// Heaven is a 
place where you are said to be always happy, I think 
it must be very beautiful. One of the most lovely 
things to beautify a place is flowers. And it is my 
opinion that we shall find lovely flowers there. It 
is said that the people who go there, who are angels, 
have wings and dress in white. Of course, / have 
never seen them, so I do not know exactly how they 
look.' 

"The most common form of criticism is that which 
appears in efforts to harmonize theology with ex- 
perience. Thus one boy says : ' I used to believe that 
the air was full of bad spirits which would hurt you, 
but I don't believe it now because they don't hurt.' 
A girl of fifteen says : ' I don't see how people can stay 
in heaven forever without nothing to do except to 
pray and sing, but people might be different there 
from what they are here.'" Other children reported 



DEVELOPMENT OF BELIEF IN YOUTH 200, 

by Mr. Barnes insist that they do not believe that 
savages and babies will go to hell, or that mothers 
can be very happy in heaven when they see their sons 
"left among the bad." 

According to Mr. Barnes this somewhat skeptical 
age (twelve to fifteen) is followed by a period of di- 
minished critical activity in religious questions. ' i One 
cannot help feeling," he says, "that they [the children 
just past fifteen] have accepted an abstraction and a 
name and have, temporarily at least, laid the questions 
which perplexed them aside. Certainly from fifteen 
to eighteen there is no such persistent exercise of 
the critical judgment in matters theological as there 
is between twelve and fifteen." 1 

That this should be so is, in fact, not surprising. 
When for the first time reflection begins, the childish 
ideas which it awakes to find demand immediate 
overhauling and rectification. After this is done the 
energy of the child flows into more objective and 
practical channels, and the skeptical spirit is not 
prominent again until somewhat maturer years and 
a new accumulation of experience bring an oppor- 
tunity for truly philosophical thought. 

But before touching on the second period of doubt 
we must glance at the more constructive work of the 
reason in the early years. For the child's thought 
upon his experience, though often resulting in the 
skeptical attitude just described, still may serve on 
the whole to strengthen his religious belief. The 

1 Op. cit., p. 447. 



2IO THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

child makes frequent use of the cosmological argu- 
ment. 1 Thus, the belief which he gets in the first 
place from the authority of his parents is very con- 
siderably strengthened. Who made things ? is the 
child's constant question ; and even the prayer which 
Mr. Chrisman overheard from his five-year-old 
daughter is typical of the frame of mind of many a 
child : " Oh, God, who made you ? Tell me, God ? " 
The spirit which prompted this prayer is the very 
Wonder which Plato says is the source of Philosophy. 
And whether or not the little mind is willing to stop 
at God, it finds at least all things else leading to Him. 
To the child God is first of all the Creator, and is 
useful, not merely as a giver of good things, but as 
the ultimate answer for most perplexing questions. 
Says Miss Shinn, "If the very little people are not 
religious, they are philosophical, for they are usually 
seized quite early with an immense curiosity about 
the causes of things, and they will follow up a chain 
of ' "whys'' till the answers perforce lead you to the 
First Cause." 2 

Just how great an influence the child's reason has 
upon his belief cannot be determined, and, of course, 
it differs tremendously with different children. There 
is no doubt, however, that it often strengthens his 

1 This, in fact, is his chief form of reasoning in theological 
matters, comparatively little attention being paid to the argument 
from design. 

2 " Some Comments on Babies," Overland Monthly , 2d Series, 
XXIII, 12. 



DEVELOPMENT OF BELIEF IN YOUTH 211 

belief materially; and it is even possible that if left 
entirely to itself the thought of the child might, in 
some cases, be an independent source of theological 
ideas — though hardly the basis of a truly religious 
faith. I add in a note some interesting cases that 
bear upon this question. 1 

1 Fannie D. Bergen has given an interesting account of a child 
whose parents made the attempt to bring him up with no religious 
instruction. Of course this was practically impossible, yet it is 
instructive to note the inherent demand of the boy's mind for some 
■first thing that should start the others going. Thus, one day when 
seven or eight he passed a marsh and asked, "Father, where did. 
the first frogs come from?" "From eggs," was the reply. "No, 
I don't mean those, I mean the very first frogs, — before there 
were any to lay eggs." Another day he exclaimed, "If I could 
only find out where the very first sand came from!" The boy 
seems to have been brought up in an atmosphere of non-re- 
ligious but scientific thought, and to have picked up many ideas 
from the conversations of his elders, which he often overheard. 
When nearly fifteen he had a serious talk with his mother in which 
he admitted his belief in some power back of life and the whole 
physical world, and though (owing apparently to what he had 
heard from his parents) he objected to conceiving this power 
anthropomorphically, he added, "When you ask me to give you 
my idea of this power it is very hard to do, for I don't believe, you 
see, in personifying it. When I try to think of it, there looms up 
before me a great beneficent, exalted kind of man. I don't believe 
in this, and it is very unfortunate, but I can't help it, and it may 
take all of my life to get rid of this notion, which is very foolish, 
but which I cannot help." (Notes on the "Theological Develop- 
ment of a Child," Arena, XIX, 266.) 

This tendency seen in so many children to reason back to a 
first cause is certainly innate, and suggests the question whether 
or not the reason alone, without any aid from authority or external 
suggestion, would be enough to bring about belief in a God; 
whether a child who grew up in complete isolation would have 



212 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

It must be admitted, however, that the use of the 
reason during childhood and youth produces doubt 

some incipient religious beliefs or would be utterly without any 
such ideas. Many children, we know, personify objects and 
causes. (For examples of this see a note in Mind, XI, 149-150, 
by E. M. Stevens, describing his boy's conception of an invisible 
malicious spirit, "Cocky," and also how the same child personi- 
fied the sun. Cf. also the "Rainer," in Sully's "Studies of Child- 
hood," p. 454.) This natural personification of objects combined 
with the tendency to work backward to a first cause would cer- 
tainly point in the direction of the possible spontaneous origin 
of religious ideas. Fortunately also we have further and rather 
more relevant data on this question, namely, the full and trust- 
worthy reports of two individuals who, when children, were cut 
off from the theological ideas of others as completely as one well 
can be in an inhabited land. I refer to the two deaf mutes, Mr. 
Ballard and Mr. D'Estrella. The former indeed never came to any 
conclusion that satisfied him until he entered the school for the deaf 
and learned the theology of his teachers, but his restless search 
for an answer to the question, "How came the world into being?" 
which he was always asking himself, is certainly significant. It 
was in his ninth year that this question first arose in his mind. 
The orderly motion of the heavenly bodies and certain striking 
meteorological phenomena were among the first things to suggest 
to him a quasi theological point of view, — as is seen in the fol- 
lowing: "I believed the sun and moon to be two round, flat plates 
of illuminating matter; and for these luminaries I entertained a 
sort of reverence on account of their power of lighting and heating 
the earth. I thought from their coming up and going down, 
traveling across the sky in so regular a manner, that there must 
be a certain something having power to govern their course." 
"One day, while we were haying in a field, there was a series of 
heavy thunder-claps. I asked one of my brothers where they came 
from. He pointed to the sky and made a zigzag motion with his 
finger, signifying lightning. I imagined there was a great man 
somewhere in the blue vault, who made a loud noise with his 
voice out of it, and each time I felt a thunder-clap I was frightened 



DEVELOPMENT OF BELIEF IN YOUTH 213 

much oftener than belief. The doubt of the child is 
half playful; that of the young man is dreadfully 

and looked up at the sky, fearing he was speaking a threatening 
word." (Reported by Samuel Porter in an article entitled " Is 
Thought Possible without Language?" in the Princeton Review 
for January, 1881, pp. 104-128.) In this connection it is interest- 
ing to read Mr. Ballard's account of his feeling on learning about 
God from his teachers a few years later. "From the uncertain 
perplexing round of speculation in which I had been groping 
back and back through the dark depths of time seeking to discover 
the origin of the universe, I found myself translated into a world 
of light wherein my mind was set at rest on this great question; 
and I felt as though I had become a new being. This revelation 
of the truth seemed to give a new dignity to everything . . . and 
it seemed to elevate the world to a higher and more honorable 
place" (p. 113). 

Mr. D'Estrella was rather more successful in his lonely search. 
Quite early he came to the conclusion that the moon was alive. 
To satisfy himself completely on this question he made use of four 
tests, — quite in the spirit of science, — each of which tended to 
confirm him in his opinion. For years he was afraid of the moon 
but loved her. She had, in fact, a great influence over his moral 
life, got somehow associated with his conscience, and helped to 
turn the tide in favor of righteousness on the night when the great 
crisis in his moral development came. The sun he considered a 
ball of fire which some "great and strong man, somehow hiding 
himself behind the hills," tossed up every morning and caught every 
evening for his own amusement. "After he began to convince 
himself about the possible existence of such a mighty God," con- 
tinues Mr. D'Estrella, speaking of himself in the third person, 
"he went on with his speculations. He supposed that the God 
lit the stars for His own use as we do the gas-lights in the street. 
When there was a wind, he supposed that it was the indication of 
His passions. A cold gale bespoke His anger, and a cool breeze 
His happy temper. Why? Because he had sometimes felt the 
breath bursting out from the mouth of angry people in the act of 
quarreling or scolding. When there were clouds, he supposed that 



214 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

earnest. A certain amount of doubt during adoles- 
cence seems, in fact, to be normal. More than two- 

they came from the big pipe of the God. Why ? Because he had 
often seen, with childish wonder, how the smoke curled from 
lighted pipes or cigars. . . . When there was a fog, the boy 
supposed it was His breath in the cold morning ; . . . when there 
was rain, he did not doubt that the God took in much water and 
spewed it from His big mouth in the form of a shower." (Quoted 
by Professor James in "Thought before Language," Phil. Rev., 
I, 615.) 

These cases are striking and perhaps exceptional — for it is 
only fair to add that a number of deaf mutes have declared that 
prior to their education they had no theological ideas whatever. 
Another case, however, namely that of one deprived not only of 
hearing but of sight as well, serves to corroborate the conclusions 
which one naturally draws from the testimony of Mr. Ballard and 
Mr. D'Estrella. I refer to Miss Helen Keller. Complete isola- 
tion from all theological ideas was indeed in her case — as in 
Laura Bridgman's — impossible. While still under nine she 
had been made familiar with the Greek gods through Kingsley's 
"Greek Heroes," but that from these she got no idea of God is 
shown by the fact that she never asked the meaning of the word 
nor made any comment on it till, a little before her ninth birthday, 
some one tried to tell her about Him. That prior to this she had 
learned nothing about the subject is made still clearer by the fact 
that she took this first lesson in theology as a huge joke. Yet 
several months before this she had asked, "Where did I come 
from?" and "Where shall I go when I die?" Here again we 
have the wonder which is the source of philosophy and theology. 
" As her observation of phenomena became more extensive," adds 
Mr. Macy, "and her vocabulary richer and more subtle, enabling 
her to express her own conceptions and ideas clearly, and also to 
comprehend the thoughts and experiences of others, she became 
acquainted with the limit of human creative power, and perceived 
that some power, not human, must have created the earth, the 
sun, and the thousand natural objects with which she was perfectly 
familiar. Finally she one day demanded a name for the power the 



DEVELOPMENT OF BELIEF IN YOUTH 21 5 

thirds of Starbuck's respondents had passed through 
a period of skepticism, and G. Stanley Hall reports 
that in over seven hundred returns from young men 
religiously reared and in Protestant colleges there 
were very few who had not wrestled with serious 
doubts on religious questions. 1 

As to the age at which doubt culminates, Starbuck's 
data, for males at least, would seem in part to carry 
out Barnes's contention that there comes a primary 
wave at fourteen or fifteen, followed by two or three 
years of comparative calm. Certainly for many men 
the great wave of doubt comes at about eighteen, 
and for many women about two years earlier. 2 

existence of which she had already conceived in her own mind." 
Just before her tenth birthday "she wrote on her tablet the follow- 
ing list of questions : — 

"'I wish to write about things I do not understand. Who 
made the earth and the seas and everything? What makes the 
sun hot ? Where was I before I came to mother ? Why does 
the earth not fall, it is so very large and heavy? Please tell your 
little pupil many things when you have much time." (From 
"The Story of My Life, " by Helen Keller, with a " Supplementary 
Account of Her Education," by John Albeit Macy, pp. 368-370.) 

If there had been no one to answer these questions, would they 
have gone unanswered? Or would the child have given herself 
an entirely positivistic or naturalistic answer? It is possible. 
But it seems much more probable that the obvious solution for 
the child would have been the image of a big man who makes things. 
On the whole, there can be little doubt that, in some cases at least, 
the reason and imagination, if left entirely to themselves and with- 
out external help, would build up a belief in some kind of a God. 

1 "Adolescence," Vol. II, p. 318. 

2 See Starbuck's "Psychology of Religion," Chap. XVIII. 
Almost no doubts arise after thirty. 



2l6 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

The two great causes or occasions for adolescent 
skepticism are, first, an inherent, almost instinctive, 
tendency to doubt, a natural rebellion against au- 
thority of all kinds, a declaration of independence 
on the part of the youth; and secondly, and much 
more important, the reaction of the young reason 
upon the new facts put before it for the first time. 
It comes upon the young man with an overwhelming 
surprise that the beliefs upon which he has been 
brought up, and which have been inculcated in 
him as the very surest and most unshakable verities 
of life, are after all based on such very uncertain 
foundations and bolstered up by such exceedingly 
flimsy arguments. For so the newly awakened young 
man regards these arguments. There is no time in a 
man's life when his reason is so unflinchingly logical, 
so careless of consequences, so intolerant of make- 
believe. His method of reasoning is still immature 
and is often crude, and in matters of philosophy and 
religion is especially likely to be so ; but it is always 
honest, always brave and straightforward, always 
self-confident. Not having yet learned the enormous 
complexity of the problems that face him and not as 
yet discouraged by a long list of past errors and mis- 
takes, he has, as at no other time of life, the courage 
of his conclusions. His delight in his new-found 
power of thought leads him to attempt to found his 
religion upon reason alone, and he usually bases his 
arguments solely upon the facts of natural science. 
The result is, of course, that he finds the foundation 



DEVELOPMENT OF BELIEF IN YOUTH 21 7 

too frail for the superstructure, and so for a while 
his religious ideas go crashing down one after 
another. 

This state of things lasts with many up to the very 
end of adolescence. Some, in fact, continue without 
any solid religious belief throughout life ; but the 
great majority reach, by the age of thirty, a period of 
" reconstruction." * A few find at last a sufficiently 
satisfactory basis for their belief in some form of 
reasoning. Some one of the various arguments — 
popular or philosophical — for God's existence comes 
in to settle the question. How seldom this happens, 
however, is shown by the extreme scarcity of such 
cases among all the responses published by Star- 
buck, Leuba, Coe, and Lancaster. Many more (pre- 
sumably mostly from those whose doubts were con- 
stitutional rather than reasoned) return to some kind 
of authority as their basis. Others, unable to take 
either of these courses, but weary of the struggle 
and the tension of doubt, deliberately choose to accept 
certain comfortable religious doctrines for the sake 
of their peace of mind. While a very great number 
find their doubts silenced if not solved for them and 
the whole question of religion settled by an inner 
experience that has been growing up unnoticed 
within them, and which, though calm and unob- 
trusive, inevitably dominates and determines their 
belief. 

1 Starbuck's term. 



2l8 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 
III 

This inner experience to which I have just referred 
— which is, of course, the same phenomenon that in 
the previous chapters I have called the Religion of 
Feeling — begins with many people, at least in its 
cruder forms, quite early in adolescence or even in 
childhood. Conversion and "spontaneous awaken- 
ing, " which have been so thoroughly studied of late, 
are the early expressions of it. The average age at 
which these phenomena appear is given somewhat 
differently by different investigators, 1 but it is cer- 

1 Luther Gulick gives the following figures, based on the re- 
sponses of 590 officers of the Y.M.C.A. to the question, "At what 
age were you first deeply affected by religious influences?" 

In childhood (indefinite) . . 59 
At 6 5 

At 7 7 

At 8 20 

At 9 13 

At 10 . . . . . . 45 

At 11 14 

At 12 69 

At 13 46 

At 14 66 

At 15 50 

At 16 44 

At 17 45 

At 18 31 

At 19 23 

At 20 13 

At 21 ■ . 11 

(From "Sex and Religion," Association Outlook, VII, 50 to 60). 
The average age of conversion in the 1784 cases collected by Coe, 



DEVELOPMENT OF BELIEF IN YOUTH 219 

tainly somewhere between thirteen and seventeen. 
We must not, however, be content with simply dat- 
ing the experience as a whole without further analysis, 
for with different people it is so diverse that it de- 
mands further distinctions if our treatment is to be 
fruitful and illuminating. 

In dealing with the Religion of Feeling in India 
and Israel, we saw that there were, roughly speaking, 
two types of religious emotion : one a violent and 
often abnormal kind of excitement, deliberately in- 
duced by social influences or well-defined methods; 
the other a comparatively calm, though often intense, 
feeling state, which never goes to the abnormal or 
fantastic extremes seen in the first type, and which 
comes upon the individual in solitude rather than in 
the crowd, is dependent not at all upon social pres- 
sure, and seems to arise more or less spontaneously, 
or if cultivated at all is to be sought by means of 
quiet contemplation. Like many other things in 
themselves perfectly distinct, these two types run into 
each other by imperceptible gradations, and may 

Starbuck, and others, is given by Coe as 16.4, though in a later 
work Professor Coe changes his opinion as to the average age and 
places it at 13.7, this new statement being due in part to Gulick's 
figures, in part to "a recent study not yet published." (See the 
"Spiritual Life," Chap. I, and "Education in Religion and 
Morals," p. 225.) Lancaster, basing his figures on 598 
answers, makes no attempt at exactness, but merely states 
the age of "new religious inclinations" somewhere between 
twelve and twenty. (" The Psychology and Pedagogy of Adoles- 
cence," Ted. Sem. V, 95.) Daniels places it a little later. ("The 
New Life," Am. Jour, of Psychol. V, 95.) 



220 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

even be found together in the same individual — 
as, for example, in certain Christian mystics. Yet 
though no hard and fast line can be drawn between 
the two, they are, as I have said, perfectly distinct. 
These two types are clearly exemplified over and 
over again by the phenomena of religious feeling so 
often displayed in America — especially in individ- 
uals passing through the adolescent period. The 
first is illustrated, of course, by the revival meeting, 
where religious excitement is in the air, and a pre- 
mium is put on feverish feeling. The spirit of the 
crowd dominates the individual, the powerful in- 
fluence of unconscious imitation gets control of him, 
and he yields his old will and his old ideas to a 
mysterious social force which compels obedience. 
To say this, however, is by no means necessarily 
to condemn revivals. Whether or not it is desirable 
that the spirit of the crowd should dominate the 
spirit of the individual will depend upon the nature 
of the two spirits. While it is undeniable that re- 
vivals often degenerate into scenes of wild and savage 
excitement — such as the "jerks" in Kentucky of a 
hundred years ago or the colored revival meeting of 
to-day — it is also equally true that they often work 
for righteousness and result in unmistakable and last- 
ing good. " By their fruits ye shall know them ; " and 
when a man like William T. Stead testifies, as he 
does, 1 to a complete and permanent revolution wrought 

1 William T. Stead, "The Revival in the West." 



DEVELOPMENT OF BELIEF IN YOUTH 221 

by a revival in his own life and in the lives of many 
men whom he has personally known, it would be 
absurd to deny that when carried on in a proper way 
they may be of considerable value. No one can 
study the psychology of religion at first hand with- 
out coming upon more than one case in which lives 
have been forever rescued from vice and shame and 
despair by the tremendous power of a revival. 

Yet we must not shut our eyes to the other side 
of the picture. Many a man is led by the excitement 
of the " inquiry room" and the " mourners' bench" to 
say and do things of which he is afterward ashamed ; 
and when the intense feeling state of the revival 
meeting burns itself out, he not merely "backslides," 
but becomes hardened, suspicious, cynical, toward all 
religion. The last state of that man is worse than the 
first. 

In fact, just because of its marvelous power when 
once started in motion, a revival is a most dangerous 
engine, and is so easily and so frequently misused and 
turned from the safe track, that one should hesitate 
long before trying to "get one up." If at times it is 
powerful for good, it is often equally powerful for evil ; 
and one can never be sure that, once started, it will 
not rouse the Hon and the hydra in man and drag 
religion down into something approaching a wild 
orgie of frenzied savages. 1 

1 I have recently been told by a physician in charge of a large 
asylum in the South that he not infrequently receives cases of 
temporary insanity induced by the excitement of a revival. Espe- 



222 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

Halfway between this crude form of religious feel- 
ing and the calmer kind referred to above stand 
most of the conversion cases which have come about 
without the influence of revivals or of great social 
pressure. In most of these cases conversion appears 
to be a perfectly normal experience. This subject, 
however, has been so exhaustively treated by others * 
that I shall not consider it further here, but shall re- 
turn at once to the milder and calmer type of expe- 
rience. 

This, as I have said, often arises spontaneously, 2 
and independently of social pressure or even of imita- 
tion. It wells up from the more instinctive and vital 

daily is this true of the revivals gotten up by the sect which seeks 
to bring about the "second blessing." One of their revivals suc- 
ceeded so well that it netted the asylum three cases in one week. 
Cf. further Davenport, " Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals" 
(passim) ; Moses, " Pathological Aspects of Religions," Am. Jour, 
of Rel. Psychol, and Ed., Monograph Supplement I., Sept. 1906, 
pp. 47-59; J. G. James, " Religious Revivals; their Ethical Sig- 
nificance." Internal. Jour, of Ethics, XVI., 332-340. 

1 I refer to. the works of Lancaster, Daniels, Leuba, Starbuck, 
Coe, Hall, and Gulick. See also James's "Varieties," Chaps. 
VIII, IX, and X; Ribot, "La Logique des Sentiments," pp. 83-88; 
and Morton Prince, "The Psychology of Sudden Religious Con- 
version," Jour, of Abnormal Psychol., I, 42-54. 

2 It is quite likely, as Henry Rutgers Marshall has suggested, 
that religious feeling of some kind might arise in a child absolutely 
cut off from all religious instruction. The cases of the two deaf 
mutes described a few pages back would seem to point in that 
direction. See also the case of the little girl referred to by Mar- 
shall, who, having received no religious instruction so far as her 
parents or teachers knew, asked, one night, if she might not " say 
a little prayer." "Instinct and Reason," p. 223, note. 



DEVELOPMENT OF BELIEF IN YOUTH 223 

regions of one's nature. It is not gained by conta- 
gion or by association .with others, but one suddenly 
finds it ; a new feeling of communion with a greater 
life fills the mind and colors the entire field of con- 
sciousness. It may begin in early childhood or even 
late in life, but as a rule it first manifests itself either 
in the beginning or at the end of adolescence. When- 
ever it comes, however, it largely dominates the fife, 
and it almost always comes to stay. It is not a tran- 
sitory burst of emotion flaring up with fever heat and 
dying out as suddenly as it is kindled, but a calm, 
quiet, lasting source of genial, vital warmth, which 
lights up the whole life and, though often smouldering, 
is seldom completely extinguished. A more detailed 
study of its nature will be found in another chapter. 
Just now we are concerned only with its origin. 

It may begin in early childhood. Out of fifteen 
cases from among my respondents in which I have 
been able to trace the origin of this calm and spon- 
taneous type of religious feeling, twelve go back to 
the tenth year or earlier. The following responses 
are good examples of this class: " There have been 
times throughout my life, beginning in early childhood, 
when I have believed myself to come consciously into 
the presence of God." "I cannot remember a time 
in my life when I did not know the meaning of God's 
presence. Very probably I was taught that God 
was with me always, but I am very sure the experience 
in question was never described to me. It arose 
spontaneously and seems to have been as natural as 



224 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

breathing." One of my friends, who has a marvel- 
ous memory and can recall events in the middle of his 
third year, writes that the experience in question be- 
gan for him when he was four years old. In most 
cases, however, it does not arise in any marked de- 
gree until the beginning of adolescence. 1 It manifests 
itself often in a new life given to old beliefs, a new 
sense for God, a sudden delight in prayer, or in some 
similar way. The following responses are reported 
by Lancaster: 2 "At fourteen I became a Christian. 
I can give no cause of the change. I then seemed to 
realize for the first time all the truths that had been 
presented before." "I feel every year greater de- 
pendence on a higher power. Religious feeling be- 
gan to deepen and change at sixteen." "I have had 
a strong desire to pray since twelve. I never tire 
of praying, it keeps me close to God. I can do noth- 
ing without God." The following responses are 
chosen almost at random from the many given by 
Starbuck: "I grew up into the simple, strong, pure 
faith of my parents. When fifteen I began to think 
more of God as a personal element in my life, turn- 
ing to him for comfort." "I had been on the rocks 
all day — shut off by the tide. I took little thought of 
time, but all day looked out upon the waves which 
came rolling up to me and then receded. I was 
awed by the forces and manifestations before me, 

1 Starbuck makes the average age of "spontaneous awakening" 
to be 13.7 years for girls and 16.3 for boys. Lancaster puts it 
at 14.8 for girls and 16 for boys. 

3 Op. cit., p. 96. 



DEVELOPMENT OF BELIEF IN YOUTH 225 

and on that day I came to wonder if it were possible 
for everything to proceed in so regular a way unless 
there were a God who had designed it, and who 
managed it all. All at once there came over me a 
sudden feeling of insignificance, and a sense of the 
immensity of the universe, of the existence and omni- 
presence of God. I fell upon my knees there, and 
my inmost being seemed to commune with something 
higher than myself. By this time the tide was down, 
and I walked back as the sun was setting ; life seemed 
new, I had been lifted up, the field of vision was 
larger; there was within me a love of mankind, and 
a determination to bear the burden of others." 1 

The case of one of my respondents is so instruc- 
tive that I give it at some length. " I think I was just 
thirteen when one night for a moment there came a 
feeling of great peace or rest. I almost held my 
breath, hoping to keep it, but it was gone, and left 
only the memory, which became an ideal for whose 
realization I began to hope and work. I called it 
peace, for the verse in Isaiah 26 s seemed to describe 
the experience better than any other. I have found 
some old notes of that year with the verse copied, 
and think that it perhaps marked the beginning of 
my search. ... It may be that it was Miss Haver- 
gal's word about 'the permanence of the joy of the 

1 Op. cit., pp. 200, 201. Cf . also George Sand's sudden religious 
awakening, so spontaneous in its nature and so lasting and benefi- 
cent in its results, described by Sully in a "Girl's Religion," 
Longman's Magazine, XVI, 89-99. 
Q 



226 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

Lord ' that gave me the assurance that such a feeling 
of peace ought to be constant instead of coming in 
flashes. It came to me only in that last way at first 
and I could not find a cause that would always pro- 
duce them, and yet I remember feeling that they 
must be governed by some law, and if I could only 
find that law, I could reproduce them at will. . . . 
One day I found in an old commentary a description 
of my experience, and it gave me as its cause absolute 
obedience to God. I had already felt that study of 
His word and prayer had a great deal to do with the 
coming of the peace. . . . Gradually, by spending 
some time alone each day, the experiences became 
longer and perhaps less intense. They were best 
expressed by the word peace, and I began to know 
that I might always have the feeling if I would in- 
stantly do the right as I saw it and would save time 
for quiet study. I found that when actual necessity 
interfered with that, the peace would not go; but 
carelessness would always drive it away." 

Every one will note the marked similarity between 
this and the descriptions given by a number of the 
Christian mystics. The experience comes at first 
unsought and in a sudden flash. This is interpreted 
in accordance with the religious ideas already held, 
and is thereafter deliberately sought. Methods for 
regaining the experience are found in records of the 
experience of others — in this case an old commen- 
tary, in the case of many of the mystics the descrip- 
tion of the orison of some previous mystic. The state 



DEVELOPMENT OF BELIEF IN YOUTH 227 

is systematically cultivated. In this my quotation is 
certainly typical of a great number of religious people. 
All the sources to which I have access agree that 
this milder type of religious experience is at first spon- 
taneous, but is thereafter very susceptible to culti- 
vation. It is more often met with in girls than in 
boys. The average boy is too much taken up with 
the objective world and with his own activities to 
give the life of inner feeling much opportunity for 
development. During periods of doubt, also, reli- 
gious feeling is apt to be rather dormant — as is often 
noticeably the case with college students. It is sad 
to note, moreover, that the image of an angry God 
which is sometimes held up before children, may in 
the case of a sensitive child crush out or delay for 
years the religious confidence and joy which is the 
child's right. One of my respondents who has en- 
tered as deeply as any one I know into the religious 
experience of which I speak writes as follows: "My 
first feeling toward God was of terror — an awful 
fear of resistless power, requiring what was to me 
impossible, yet regarding me with anger because I 
did not love him. I thought him infinitely selfish 
and cruel." Although hers was a nature which, if 
left to itself, would have been the home of unusually 
deep religious feeling, the stern theological ideas with 
which she had been brought up prevented her from 
knowing what it was until well past twenty — and 
then it took the death of a favorite brother to reveal 
it to her. 



228 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

But while doubt or a harsh, unlovely creed may 
often dwarf religious feeling, this in its turn when 
once started is a great re enforcement to belief. This 
we have seen repeatedly in the history of the race, 
and we now see it repeated in the history of the in- 
dividual all through the adolescent period. Nearly 
all the recent work on the psychology of religion, so 
far as it is here relevant, bears out this statement. 1 
The cold, half-dying belief of the intellect is often 
warmed into life by getting into touch with the vital 
forces of the feeling background, and once so vivified 
and identified with the deepest currents of one's life, 
is seldom thereafter subject to doubt or assailable 
by argument. 2 At every turn throughout adolescence 
we find reason failing the young mind in its attempts 

1 The mental attitude so common in the conversion cases 
recently studied, and described by Leuba as the "faith state" 
is an example : "A specific psychic state which is or can be accom- 
panied by certainty as to the reality of intellectual conceptions, 
religious or other, a certainty not secured by the ordinary processes 
of the mind when seeking to arrive at scientific truth." 

2 Cf. the theological student reported by Leuba, who had been 
led by reasoning to doubt the authority of the Fourth Gospel, and 
with it the whole Christian faith. He describes his experiences 
thus: "I yielded myself to what I conceived to be the Higher 
Guidance. ... At the close of the period I found myself at one 
with all things. Peace, that was all. . . . Strange to say, the 
arguments seemed not to enter into my thinking. There was no 
appropriate faculty and capacity for them in me. They stood 
apart from me. I could take up the logical standpoint and see 
that they were quite convincing, and yet my inner peace of belief 
was in no way disturbed." (Am. Jour, of Psychol., VII, 309-385. 
Cf. also Leuba's article, "Faith," Am. Jour, of Rel. Psychol, and 
Ped., May, 1904.) 



DEVELOPMENT OF BELIEF IN YOUTH 2 29 

to gain a satisfactory basis for its faith, and the in- 
stinctive forces of the vital background furnishing 
the only reliable materials for such a foundation. 

When the turmoil of the adolescent period is over, 
the individual, now at his full development, pulls 
himself together and settles down, as a rule, to 
some settled and satisfactory form of belief. Accord- 
ing to Starbuck this release from doubt and return 
to some kind of faith is seldom due to any course of 
reasoning but is determined rather by the instinctive 
and vital forces of the organism, both psychical and 
physical. Religious faith is no longer viewed as a set 
of propositions to be reasoned about, as in the adoles- 
cent period, but is seen "from within." Starbuck 
quotes the following responses as typical : * " I learned 
that religion is not something tacked on to life. From 
external observance I passed to subjective life and 
oneness with Spirit." "I came to see that to know 
God is not a matter of the intellect, but that to live 
is to know Him." 

It is interesting to note that the religious feeling of 
this " period of reconstruction" and of adult life in 
general (as we shall see better in the next chapter) 
is almost always of the calm and lasting type. The 
excitement of the revival meeting and of the feverish 
and imitative conversion is seldom found after twenty- 
five. The feeling which comes in these later years is 
almost always spontaneous, unforced, natural. It is 

1 Op. cit., p. 290. 



230 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

a thoroughly normal phenomenon, and the condition 
most favorable for it is health, both mental and physi- 
cal. Starbuck's figures, moreover, go to show that it 
receives a new impetus at the end of adolescence and 
continues to grow for many years thereafter ; whereas 
religion as centering in intellectual conceptions as 
steadily declines. The latter is found, according to 
Starbuck's data, chiefly among young men between 
twenty and twenty-four, and with them in constantly 
diminishing measure as life advances, while with 
women it is but seldom found at all. The "belief 
in religion as a life within," on the other hand, is 
comparatively rare among the young, but when once 
started has a steady and rapid growth, so that after 
forty it is one of the most important elements of the 
religious life. 

This ends our examination of the growth of reli- 
gious belief during childhood and adolescence, and 
brings us up to the years of maturity. It was impor- 
tant to see how faith arose in the individual, and how 
it developed in the formative period. An equally 
important question is why the adult, in full possession 
at length of all his powers, continues to believe. 
This question must be attacked in the following 
chapter. 



CHAPTER VIII 

TYPES OF BELIEF IN MATURE LIFE * 

If one will stop to consider carefully the status of 
religious belief in an average American community, 
he will, I think, be struck with its real strength and its 
almost unanimous acceptance. Whenever I hear 
that oft-repeated question, "Why in these last days 
are there so many skeptics?" I feel like responding, 
Why are there so many believers? For as a fact 
we find our friends and neighbors, of all degrees of 
education and intellectual ability, almost to a man 
accepting God as one of the best recognized realities 
of their world and as simply not to be questioned. 
That the young and immature should accept as 
much as they do is perhaps not surprising. But why 
does the mature adult mind, having altered very con- 
siderably the ideas of its childhood, still cling, even 
down to old age, to a belief in something that it calls 
divine ? And by this question I do not mean to ask 
what are the reasons by which it would seek to jus- 
tify its belief ; but what are the causes, the true bases, 
on which the belief rests ? I know of no question in 
the Psychology of Religion more fundamental than 

1 This chapter appeared, in somewhat different form, in the 
Journal of Religious Psychology and Education, for March, 1906. 

231 



232 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

this, and none that has more immediate bearing on 
the theoretical and practical problems of religious life. 

It was to make a start toward the answer to these 
questions that I prepared the circular on the results 
of which this chapter is based, a copy of which will 
be found in the Appendix. My chief aim was to dis- 
cover, if possible, the relation of argument and of un- 
reasoned experience to popular belief, and more in 
particular to gain some idea of the prevalence of any 
real and vital experience interpreted by the subject 
of it as an immediate knowledge of God — in other 
words to see roughly how far the "mystic germ," 
as Professor James calls it, has spread in the religious 
community. Much is said in religious circles about 
the "experience of the presence of God" ; my object 
was to discover what in general is meant by that ex- 
perience, and whether it is confined to a very few or 
is a fairly common possession. 

No one is more keenly alive to the dangers of the 
questionnaire method than one who has tried it. 
In the first place, the number of answers that one can 
by any possibility get is insignificant in the extreme 
compared with the size of the community from which 
they are gathered, and in which alone one is inter- 
ested. The value of these answers depends, there- 
fore, wholly upon their being thoroughly typical — 
"a fair sample" * as the logician would say. And 
with the questionnaire method fair sampling is for 

1 The expression is that of Mr. Charles Peirce. 



TYPES OF BELIEF IN MATURE LIFE 233 

several reasons especially difficult. In the first place 
natural selection brings answers from only one or 
two types of people. Those who are in any way 
extreme or unusual are likely to jump at the oppor- 
tunity to express their views; while the people who 
are really typical of the community at large — just 
the ones, that is, whose answers would be especially 
valuable — often think it not worth their while to 
answer, since they have nothing unusual or especially 
interesting to record. The interest and the value of 
a response often stand in inverse ratio. Moreover, 
even when truly typical persons do answer, their ex- 
pressions as written often represent merely the mood 
that happened to be uppermost at the hour of writing, 
or depend on the chance presence in the mind of 
certain ideas at that particular time. Lastly, the mere 
fact that a question is presented, tends to put the 
mind in a theoretical and unusual state, and thereby 
very considerably to influence the answer. While all 
these things are true, however, I do not think they 
destroy the value of the method if used with great 
care. The first danger — namely, the tendency of 
natural selection to bring in answers chiefly from 
extremists — I have tried to avoid by letting natu- 
ral selection have as little as possible to do with it. 
My endeavor was to distribute the greater part of my 
questions among truly typical religious people (so 
far as one can judge of "typical religious people") 
and a large proportion of my responses come from 
persons whom I know personally to be (to all appear- 



234 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

ance) "fair samples" of the religious community. 
I have also carefully weeded out from the an- 
swers several that obviously came from religious 
freaks. The second and third difficulties pointed 
out above of course cannot be fully obviated; yet 
I believe that their evil effects have been largely 
avoided by the fact that in my treatment of the re- 
sponses I have throughout refused to take the an- 
swers at their face value, but have interpreted each 
paper as a whole. Some of the questions were put 
in purely with this in view, — namely, numbers i, 
7, 8, and io, — while nearly all, as will be seen, bear 
upon one general question. In a number of cases 
also I have called upon the respondents and talked 
over their answers with them ; or when this was im- 
possible, have sometimes written for further light 
on particular points. I sent out five hundred and 
fifty copies and received eighty-three answers. My 
respondents are divisible roughly into two classes; 
(i) those whom I believe I may rightly call typical 
"church people " ; and (2) a somewhat motley collec- 
tion of intellectual people, professors, graduate stu- 
dents, a few members of the Society for Psychical 
Research, etc. Whether these latter form a really 
fair sample of the intellectual community of America 
I am not certain. Of my eighty-three responses, 
fifty-seven come from class (1), twenty-six from class 
(2). Three of my respondents did not believe in 
any sort of God, two were obviously "freaks," and 
one response could not be safely interpreted. This 



TYPES OF BELIEF IN MATURE LIFE 235 

leaves, therefore, seventy-seven cases for our 
use. 

Anything like definite statistics from so small a 
number of cases would, of course, be valueless ; but 
I do think it will be of considerable value for the 
purpose of our investigation to treat my cases as 
types of the religious consciousness, — as "straws," 
so to speak, — and as indicating in a general way 
the nature and the strength of the belief in God as 
it exists to-day in the Protestant communities of the 
eastern part of our country. If the cases be thus 
viewed in relation to our problem of the basis of reli- 
gious belief, they fall into three classes, which I 
shall now consider in some detail. 



The first class is made up of those who may be said 
to believe in God from authority (in the first sense 
of the word) or from habit and inertia. The belief 
of these people might almost be classed as primitive 
credulity and is certainly strongly tinged with it. 
They believe because when children they were taught 
so to do, and having formed the mental habit, they 
would find it difficult and unpleasant to make a 
change. Inertia plays a large part in belief of all 
kinds. Once started in a given direction, it is for 
many people hard to stop or to change the direction — 
especially in that class of minds not given to specu- 
lation and independent thought. "As the twig is 
bent, the tree is inclined." The early lessons of 



236 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

childhood retain some influence with all of us, and 
with a large number of people their importance is 
immense. There are a great many intelligent peo- 
ple who believe because they always have believed. 
Others retain their faith because it is the easiest thing 
to do — skepticism and atheism require rather too 
much energy and time from a busy man. The fol- 
lowing is typical: "Entirely a matter of training. 
I was brought up in the Presbyterian Church — 
took pride in being an atheist all through my college 
course — though always attended church and Sun- 
day-school. When I got into life other questions 
crowded this one into the background, where it has 
hovered, unsolved, ever since. So far as I have come 
to any conclusion at all it is this : that if there isn't 
a God there ought to be, and I'll act accordingly." 
With all his theoretical skepticism this same man in 
answer to question 5 says, "I think I may say He is 
a very real Person to me." The exigencies of a life 
given up to scientific research have prevented him 
from ever getting to the end of his thought on religious 
questions, so he easily and naturally falls back on the 
habit of childhood, with the remark, "My religion 
is a bundle of inconsistencies which I have long ago 
quit trying to reconcile." I think this to be a fairly 
common experience. There are doubtless a great 
many people who simply take God for granted with- 
out further thought; they believe because they do 
not disbelieve. This same influence of habit is seen 
even more often among a large number of those whom 



TYPES OF BELIEF IN MATURE LIFE 237 

I have called "church people." Typical among 
them are such expressions as the following : — 

"My belief in God is from the authority of the 
Bible and from parental instruction in youth." "I 
believe in personal immortality because I have been 
taught it." Another writes : " God, as I have been 
taught from youth up by parents and publicly, is a 
spirit, infinite in all his counsels. . . . This knowl- 
edge of God thus taught to me by others, added to 
what I have gleaned from the study of the Word of 
God, has gradually crystallized into a belief, how I 
cannot tell." 

In this class belong a large proportion of the 
unthinking — both Catholic and Protestant — who 
swallow their creed as they swallow their pills. Those 
indeed who reason about the validity of their author- 
ity — be it Church or Book — belong not here but in 
our next class ; yet there are millions who, possibly 
after a slight adolescent struggle, have allowed them- 
selves to slip back into the unquestioning acceptance 
of whatever is taught by their chosen authority. 

In this connection it will be of interest to consider 
the answers to question 9, which had to do with the 
authority of the Bible. The 73 answers to this 
question were divided into two almost equal parts, 
34 accepting the authority of the Bible and 39 re- 
jecting it. As was to be expected, nearly all those 
whom I have described as belonging to the "intel- 
lectual" rather than to the "church" class were 
among those who answered No to my question, only 



23& THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

2 out of 23 recognizing the Bible's authority. Of the 
50 answers from church people 32 accepted and 18 
rejected the book's authority, 22 saying that their 
religious faith and their religious life were based on it. 
That is, almost exactly half of the "typical religious 
people" who answered my question feel that their 
belief and their religion are dependent on the old 
way of viewing the Bible, the other half feeling inde- 
pendent for their religious life from its authority, or 
rejecting it (in the old sense) altogether. To the 
question, "How would your belief in God and your 
life toward him and your fellow-men be affected by 
loss of faith in the authority of the Bible?" a few 
responses were received like the following: "It 
would take away the foundation through which I 
was led to believe in God." "I would as soon give 
up faith in God Himself as in the authority of the 
Bible." "I think I should be utterly miserable and 
unable to accomplish any good thing." But in most 
cases no such serious results are imagined, the fol- 
lowing being typical: "It would not affect my faith 
in God, but would greatly lessen my comfort." "I 
believe I would still cling to my faith." "My belief 
in God would not be affected." The position of those 
who no longer accept the authority of the Bible is 
fairly well exemplified by the following: "There is 
much for me in its teachings, but I feel it is a rather 
second-hand statement of what I feel in my own ex- 
perience." The results of question 9, if the responses 
are fair samples, would seem to indicate that, while 



TYPES OF BELIEF IN MATURE LIFE 239 

a good proportion of the community still cling to the 
authority of the Scriptures, they are gradually giving 
it up with increased intelligence and study, and would 
be able to give it up altogether without any very seri- 
ous injury to their religious faith. 

The leading characteristic of this first type of belief 
is, as I have said, its strong tinge of primitive credulity. 
But I need hardly point out that it still differs greatly 
from the simple faith, the almost hypnotic sugges- 
tibility, of childhood. The naive adult mind which 
still clings to authority from the force of habit does not 
cling to any and every authority; and though the 
choice of authority is usually quite a matter of chance, 
there is still a new quasi-rational element in this belief 
not to be found in that of the child, and which causes 
our first type to pass by imperceptible gradations 
into the second. 

II 

Our second type of religious belief rests explicitly 
on some sort of argument — good, bad, or indifferent. 
These arguments are of various sorts. One large 
class of them may be set down as belief from author- 
ity — in the second sense of that word as I have used 
it. The authority is accepted in the same way that 
the word of any scientific expert is accepted — one 
does not believe it merely from habit, but because it 
seems the wise thing to do. I have a Roman Catholic 
friend — a college graduate — who puts the matter 
thus : " If I am sick, I go to a doctor, for it is his busi- 



240 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

ness to know about medicine and the body ; if I want 
to learn Latin, I go to a Latin teacher, for he has 
studied and knows. In like manner, if I want to 
know about God, I go to the Church as represented 
by some priest — for I have no time to investigate 
these matters myself and the priest has, and the 
Church is the authority in things religious just as the 
physician and the teacher are in their departments." 
This is doubtless the attitude of thousands, both 
Catholic and Protestant. Nine tenths of our " facts " 
we accept on faith — why not our religious facts as 
well? especially since so many others have done 
so for so many years and with such good results. 
This, it will be noticed, is by no means any longer 
an unreasoned belief, and it differs from the more 
confessedly argumentative type chiefly in the choice 
of the particular facts on which the reasoning shall 
be based. Of course such an argument often goes 
in a circle ; but this is unnoticed, as, for instance, in 
the following: "I believe in God from authority, 
as contained in the Bible in passages declaring him- 
self as God, as ' I am God, and there is none else ; 
I am God and there is none like me ; ' there are many 
other assurances that might be quoted." Many 
thoughtful persons, however, who would see as 
quickly as any one the inconsistency of such reason- 
ing, still cling to authority, but in a different sense. 
They may have given up the literal inspiration of the 
Bible, but still retain their confidence in the authority 
of certain prophetic persons, especially of Jesus. One 



TYPES OF BELIEF IN MATURE LIFE 241 

woman writes : " More than on anything else I believe 
my belief rests on the -strong and unreasoned asser- 
tions of Jesus Christ. But His assertions do not stand 
out as isolated facts. I find them coming as the cul- 
mination of what may well be called revelations of 
God through human life." Another respondent 
names as his authority, "the whole tradition of reli- 
gious people to which something in me makes admir- 
ing response." Another, after tracing the origin of 
his belief in childhood to the authority of parents, 
teachers, the Bible, etc., continues thus: "By this 
time, however, argument was undoubtedly playing 
its part in giving me grounds of belief in God. My 
mind searched more or less the grounds of authority, 
whether of parents, Bible, Christ, or commanding 
figures in the history of religion. Did they have the 
right to speak? Did their lives give evidence that 
what they spoke was true ? I think this has been one 
of the strongest lines of evidence in building up my 
present faith. I could not and cannot account satis- 
factorily for the lives of 'men of God,' nor even of 
some at least of religious institutions, without the 
assumption that there was a reality represented by 
their faith and word, however imperfectly." 

The more extremely rationalistic members of this 
second class whose religious belief is explicitly based 
chiefly on reasoning often disparage all forms of reli- 
gious feeling and all reliance upon it. One man says : 
"I believe in God as an intellectual and moral neces- 
sity. Any feelings which I may have in the matter 



242 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

grow out of the perception of the realities which create 
these necessities. . . . God is a reality to me as a 
rational being. Any experiences which I may have 
had which were accompanied by 'feeling' I have 
explained as above, and this, it seems to me, forms 
a rational basis for the explanation of all such phe- 
nomena in others. " The reasons given are various; 
sometimes the order and design in nature are men- 
tioned, sometimes the progress of the race. One 
says, " I believe in God because I cannot conceive of a 
world like ours except as made and controlled by a 
Person." Another writes, "The modern demonstra- 
tion of telepathy has helped me greatly." An exam- 
ple of the queer twists that get into some minds who 
consider their faith founded on rational grounds is 
seen in the following answer: "Reasons for the be- 
lief in God (i) The argument of my belief is that I 
have it as a gift from Him." 1 In striking contrast 
to this is the following : " Denning God as the Super- 
natural of Answer to question 2, I think I believe 
in Him for the following reasons : (1) I find in every- 
day experiences that there are impulses, attitudes, 
valuations, made by myself and other people, which 
seem entirely unjustifiable by any experiences we 
have of things and courses of events in the world 
about us. The chiefest example is the way otherwise 
rational people act altruistically while every dictate 

1 This is not one of the answers I have put in Class 1. The 
whole paper indicates that the man's real basis for belief is au- 
thority, but he thivks it is reasoning. 



TYPES OF BELIEF IN MATURE LIFE 243 

of reason would seem to compel them to act with an 
ultimate selfish end. — "(2) More intimately, I seem 
to have quite frequently a strong feeling of the good- 
ness of certain courses of action, states of mind, etc., 
apart from any good this may do me, or anybody else. 
These feelings of goodness seem somehow to be very 
valid and to carry their own credentials so that they 
disarm doubt." The old argument to a "Great 
First Cause" is not once mentioned. Of my 77 
cases 22 belong here. 

Ill 

The third type of religious belief according to my 
classification if it must be labeled at all may, per- 
haps, best be referred to by the term used in Chapter 
II — " emotional belief." It includes all those per- 
sons whose faith springs from a demand or desire or 
from a more or less vague, intuitive, affective expe- 
rience. This third class is so large that we can best 
deal with it by distinguishing those cases which rest 
upon an explicit demand or wish from those which 
depend upon what seems to be a touch of mysticism. 

The first of these two divisions is, then, character- 
ized by the " will to believe." One man writes he be- 
lieves, not because he has experienced God's presence, 
" but rather because I need it so that it ' must ' be true." 
Another believes "chiefly because God is the only 
hope of the universe. Take away this belief and our 
existence is hopeless." "I believe in God especially 
for moral reasons. Things seem to me senseless and 



244 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

dead if He does not exist and if I cannot believe He 
helps me on the way." One of the most explicit 
is the following: " Because I personally want to be- 
lieve in Him. ... I pray because I like to. . . . I 
believe in immortality because I like to." Doubtless 
a great many people belong to this class without know- 
ing it. They think it is the authority of the Bible 
or some argument on which their faith is based, 
whereas it really is the picture of the fear and despair 
that would follow the loss of faith that makes them 
cling to it. An analysis of the arguments used in 
many sermons whose aim is to defend orthodox doc- 
trines would point to the same conclusion ; the ques- 
tion discussed seems often to be, not What is true ? 
but What is pleasant to believe? The pragmatic 
appeal is constantly made; the old doctrine brings 
happiness, therefore let us cling to it. One respon- 
dent writes that, after several years of skepticism 
and argument, and of keeping his nerves "on a 
constant and useless strain," he had to come back 
"to the plain, solid ideas which were drilled into us in 
childhood. Then comes a peace of mind regarding 
our religious status. We have seen the practical 
application. We have seen men die as Christians 
and others as infidels. We are awakened from our 
dreams of youth." 

But the great majority of this third type of believers 
is made up of those whose faith is dominated and con- 
trolled by a touch of mysticism. This is present in 
a variety of stages which range from vague cases 



TYPES OF BELIEF IN MATURE LIFE 245 

somewhat conventionally expressed up to experiences 
of a very intense sort;' but all those in whom this 
" mystic germ" — or flower or fruit — is to be found 
agree in basing their belief in God on some experience 
which they interpret as an immediate knowledge of 
Him. Typical expressions are the following: "I 
believe in God because I am aware of Him. I cannot 
conceive of any argument on the existence of God 
that would not be blinding and confusing. Watch- 
ing the effect of such arguments on others confirms 
my thought." "I believe in God principally be- 
cause I have experienced His presence ; if at times 
my belief grows weak, the memory of such experi- 
ences helps me." "Authority and argument are 
practically without significance as factors determin- 
ing my belief; immediate experience of Him as an 
ever present reality is my main basis for recognizing 
His existence." "My belief in God rests primarily, 
I think, upon experiences reaching back into child- 
hood. ... I have never seriously doubted the 
existence of God. If I ever had done so, I think I 
should have fallen back upon my own consciousness 
of Him at certain times of my life as evidence that 
I could not doubt." 

My results indicate that these quasi-mystics form 
a very large class, 40 out of 77 respondents belonging 
to it, while 16 more claim to have had the experience 
referred to, though in their case it does not seem to be 
the principal foundation of belief. These figures 
are certainly significant. That 56 people out of 77 



246 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

should believe firmly that they have been in imme- 
diate communion with God is a striking fact. More- 
over, this is admittedly the religious experience par 
excellence; here we are at the very heart of religion. 
It is therefore a burning problem for religious psy- 
chology to discover if possible just what these people 
mean by " communion with God." What sort of an 
experience is it ? How does God feel ? Almost my 
whole questionnaire was directly or indirectly aimed 
at collecting data that should bear on this problem, 
while question 5 was written especially for that pur- 
pose. The importance of the phenomenon will 
necessitate a more detailed study of the responses 
than I have given in the case of any of the preceding 
types. 

There is no sharp and fast line between those who 
have been "conscious of God's presence" and those 
who have not. The experience shades down through 
all degrees of intensity, and the interpretation one 
shall put upon it depends largely on one's general 
religious notions. There are people absolutely de- 
void of any experience like that referred to. On the 
other hand, the number of those who have had at 
least flashes of some faint form of mystical experi- 
ence is probably considerably larger than is generally 
believed. Many of those who are utterly igno- 
rant of what is meant by " communion with God" 
have a dim unreasoned and untaught feeling for a 
beyond that is really a faint approach toward the 
more typically religious experience. One of my 



TYPES OF BELIEF IN MATURE LIFE 247 

respondents, for instance, whom I have classed as 
having no sense of God's presence, tells me that 
though he dislikes all exact definitions of God and 
has in vain tried to pray, he has in the background 
of his consciousness a dim sense of God. In its 
elusory, vague nature it is like a tune that keeps going 
in the back of one's mind and which, though always 
present, one can never grasp or define or analyze. 
His sense of God is no less faint and elusive. And 
yet he feels that if it should vanish there would be a 
great hush, a great void in his life. Especially in 
times of moral crisis he feels it, as a sense of an un- 
known something backing him up. And although de- 
void of Gottesbewusstsein in the directer and stronger 
sense, he adds: "There is something in me which 
makes response when I hear utterances from that 
quarter made by others. I recognize the deeper 
voice. Something tells me, Thither lies truth." 

One of the vaguest forms of experience which is 
interpreted by those who have it as the consciousness 
of God's presence is scarcely distinguishable from 
aesthetic emotion aroused by the beauties of nature, 
and coupled with the thought of God which is already 
in the mind. "His presence," writes one respondent, 
"I find in the deeps of nature and of human nature. 
I never feel so devotional as when in a great wood 
where I cannot see out, on the sea, on the seashore, or 
out at night, under the stars." Another writes, " Yes, 
in one sense He is real. When I see the sunlight 
shining through the leaves of the forest trees and 



248 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

lighting up the ferns and flowers unseen by any one 
else save myself, I have felt a nearness of God that 
I have never felt under the influence of any sermon." 
In such a case it is, of course, the belief that one hap- 
pens to hold which turns what would otherwise be 
merely aesthetic pleasure into what is interpreted as 
a religious experience. It must be noted, however, 
that the emotion as actually felt is & religious one 
and is decidedly different from mere aesthetic delight 
in nature, and, whatever its cause, it often assumes 
great significance and authority in the life and belief 
of the individual. 

An evanescent form of what might be called vague 
cosmic emotion would also belong here, — as for 
instance the following: "I do not like the masculine 
pronoun in speaking of the Divine Energy; conse- 
quently have not experienced His presence, but have 
felt a thrill of unspeakable joy and pleasure, as the 
thoughts of the Higher Life have come to me. . . . 
I will say in addition that Something comes to me, 
as a great mental stimulus and spiritual uplift." 
"On certain rare days," says another, "and under 
circumstances that I cannot analyze, but of which 
essentials are to be at peace with others and with 
myself, and being in the presence of some aspect of 
nature, there falls upon me all of a sudden an ex- 
traordinary feeling of sympathy with nature. I have 
felt it by looking out of the window, in the evening, 
by hearing the wind in the trees, when lying on the 
grass, by admiring a sunset, contemplating mountain 



TYPES OF BELIEF IN MATURE LIFE 249 

scenery. Then it seems that things have a sort of 
language of their own and that they speak of peaceful 
joy. . . . Then the soul leaps — where ? I do not 
know. How? I cannot tell. But we feel as if we 
were lifted above ourselves into a new world, and we 
would so much like not to have to fall back on the 
trivial earth in a moment. These experiences can 
never last more than a minute or two. It can hardly 
be called a sense of presence, because there is not 
necessarily a prayer, or of communion with God, 
but as it were the insight into a grander world.' ' 

The experience of the divine presence comes to 
many people in more definite form in times of great 
trouble. The emotional life is then already most 
intense, the sense of loss and despair is almost crush- 
ing, the will demands help but cannot find it. At 
such a time the idea of a "Divine Helper" in whom 
one has been taught to believe forces its way out of 
the background of consciousness, dominates the 
thought, and forms a center round which the varied 
emotional elements crystallize. The whole organism 
is roused to intense excitement, consciousness seems 
to be more susceptible to slight influences from the 
subconscious or unconscious regions, and the deepest 
vital needs of the whole personality, ordinarily half 
dormant in the fringe region, take control. It is at 
such times in particular that the sense of an invisible 
presence comes. One woman writes, "God as my 
Father is very real. Have I experienced His pres- 
ence? Yes, and more than once. The most vivid 



250 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

and never to be forgotten was the strength, peace, and 
quietness that came as we watched the outgoing of our 
first little boy." "I do feel that I have experienced 
His presence very distinctly many times. . . . When 
praying for the life of very sick children, the voice 
came, What if it be My will to take them? Through 
His help I was enabled to say, Thy will be done. He 
took them, but not only helped me to bear my bur- 
den, but gave me a bright revelation of Himself." 
Another woman writes of her experience when nurs- 
ing her sick husband in a foreign land. He had 
been taken suddenly and very dangerously ill, and no 
one was near to whom she could speak. "The an- 
guish was mortal at times, but God seemed so tangi- 
bly near I never felt less alone. I struggled with all 
my might to save him and to see and do the best thing, 
but nothing was ever more real to me than that God 
was the strength of my life. ' A very present help in 
trouble,' I used to say over and over. It seemed as 
if He and I were alone in the universe." Another 
writes : " I shall never forget the feeling of the presence 
of God with me on that night when all alone in a 
stranger's house on the hill I worked over my precious 
child, realizing as I worked that I could not save his life 
and that nothing could. I could almost hear the 
words, ' When thou passest through the waters I will 
be with thee ' — and in the dreadful loneliness and 
anxiety and grief there came a wonderful peace and 
a feeling of God's presence that I am very certain of." 
A not uncommon but striking form of this experi- 



TYPES OF BELIEF IN MATURE LIFE 25 1 

ence is the sudden conversion, of which so many cases 
are reported by Leuba, Starbuck, and James. Habits 
of years' standing are overthrown in as many moments 
and not only the man's evaluations of objects and 
his general outlook upon the world, but his very or- 
ganic impulses and desires, are so utterly transformed 
that he can scarcely recognize himself and must needs 
consider such a momentous change the work of a 
power not himself. One of my respondents who is 
now a city missionary on the East Side in New York 
writes : " I came to Him a dying drunkard and he gave 
me repentance. I cried to Him and He saved me 
instantly. I have never wanted a drink nor sworn 
an oath nor stolen a cent since." 

An instance much less striking but of the same 
general nature was told me by another of my respond- 
ents. Though he had always lived a respectable 
and moral life and frequently attended church for 
his wife's sake, he had never taken any interest in 
religion and had no notion of what was meant by a 
religious experience. One day his wife asked him to 
teach a class of boys in the Sunday-school, and he of 
course refused. The next Sunday he was at the 
post-office just before the Sunday-school opened, 
and suddenly felt an irresistible impulse to go to the 
church and take the class. His words are, " If a rope 
had been round my waist and twenty men at the other 
end pulling me toward the church, the impelling 
force would not have been stronger." He taught 
the class for six months, but with no special religious 



252 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

interest. At the end of that time his wife persuaded 
him one evening to go with her to "preparatory lec- 
ture." He went merely to please her and paid no 
attention to what was said by the speaker. But 
during the course of the meeting he began to feel that 
he must make a change in his life then and there, and 
that he must get up and declare his purpose before 
the end of the meeting or he should die in his seat. 
He rose and did so, and a new experience began 
for him from that hour. Ever since then he has 
had the constant feeling that he is " never alone," but 
is being guided by a power that is not himself. What 
this power is he does not know, but he interprets it 
as the Holy Spirit. He cannot conceive of anything 
that could shake his faith, so unquestionable is the 
experience. It does not come in waves, but is con- 
stant ; a feeling of joy and peace, but best expressed 
by saying that he is never alone. The otherness of 
the experience seems to be its chief characteristic. 

The influence of the subconscious in this case is 
obvious. The thought of teaching the class and the 
feeling of duty connected with it, which he resolutely 
put out of his mind, had been working throughout 
the week in the subliminal region, and when the 
arrival of the hour for Sunday-school suggested the 
thought of the class, the feeling of obligation, made 
intense by the week's subconscious gestation, forced 
itself upon him with a strength not to be resisted, 
and in a way that suggested an external power. The 
same subconscious working was evidently influential 



TYPES OF BELIEF IN MATURE LIFE 253 

in his final conversion. The necessary influence of 
these experiences upon his belief is obvious. 

The descriptions thus far given have been some- 
what indefinite as to the nature of the experience in 
question. Nothing seems to be harder for the aver- 
age person than to put himself into the psychological 
attitude, or even to conceive what that attitude is. 
Nearly all write as if "communion with God" were 
a universal experience and needed no further descrip- 
tion. I have had, however, a few definite statements 
and a number which, though rather indefinite, still 
help one to make out what is meant by the phrase in 
question. It must be remembered, however, that we 
are dealing here with an experience which all those 
who have had it agree in describing as indescribable ; 
and if such a virtuoso at introspection as St. Teresa 
had to despair of putting into words the nature of 
this experience, we must not expect too much of my 
respondents. 

One of my questions was: "How does it" (the 
"communion" experience) "affect you physically ? " 
This was simply ignored by the majority, while many 
of the others insisted that there was no physical effect 
whatever. The chief reason for these answers is, 
of course, lack of introspective power ; though there 
seems also to be at least one other, namely, that hinted 
at in the following somewhat naive expression, 
"When I try to describe such an experience in words, 
the terms are terms of sensation and they should 
not be." 



254 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

The following response describes at least the in- 
fluence of physical conditions on the experience in 
question: "I have been conscious of God in differ- 
ent sorts of physical and mental conditions, although 
most strongly so when my condition was in every way 
normal. When I feel well and think clearly, I am 
most confident of the divine life. When I have been 
specially conscious of physical weakness with a head- 
ache or other insistent pain and when I have been 
bent on some purpose morally inconsistent, I think 
I have been least conscious of God." In addition to 
this I have two definite answers which will help to 
show us, in the case of two individuals at least, 
how God feels. " When I experience the presence of 
God ... I feel, physically, aggressive but self- 
poised, exhilarated but not impulsive, my chest swells, 
my breathing is deep and satisfying, and I seem to see 
the way to action opened up and the strength to do it." 
"With me the physical effects begin usually with a 
quivering and upheaving of the diaphragm which 
starts a wave of sensation upward through the chest 
region and into the pharynx, and results in incipient 
yawning. This in turn is followed by an excitement 
of the lachrymal glands and tears sometimes fill my 
eyes. All these physical sensations, considered 
merely as such, are mildly pleasing. After they are 
over comes a sense of great refreshment." 

The " mental effects," as might be expected, are 
much more generally described — perhaps it would 
be more exact to say that the descriptions are more 



TYPES OF BELIEF IN MATURE LIFE 255 

often given in conceptual than in sensational terms. 
The sense of God's presence, apprehended with 
something of the certainty of a visible presence, is 
frequently the only thing mentioned in the experi- 
ence. 1 " God is very real to me in the experience of 
His presence. I talk with Him and He talks with me. 
He is my companion. When our fellowship is un- 
disturbed, He controls my thoughts and likewise my 
body." " Yes, I have experienced His presence, but 
not so vividly since childhood. I remember, very 
distinctly, when I had been harshly if not unjustly 
treated, and sent to bed, feeling His arms about me, 
so that I would even be glad to finish my prayers 
to feel my Heavenly Father comfort me. Since I 
have been a woman grown it has been only a sense 
of some one with me, correcting, reminding, or com- 
forting." "As a child of seven I remember the 
emotion that filled me one evening at the sight of the 
evening star in a clear sky. It was an overpowering 
sense of infinity and of purity, and was perhaps the 
beginning of a strong personal desire to know God 
and to be in harmony with His great purposes. 
Often since then I have felt the same kind of emo- 
tion, with the sense of an encircling presence as vast 
as the universe and perfect in purity. The effect 
upon me I could describe only as calm and peace; 
physically there was nothing." The " presence" 
is not to be further described, but simply to be felt. 

1 Cf. Professor James's discussion of the "Sense of Presence," 
" Varieties of Religious Experience," pp. 58-63. 



256 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

" God is as real to me as the sense of happiness or 
the sense of love. As I sit by my friend, even ab- 
stracting the expression of his face, I often, by the 
communion of his soul and mine, know that he is 
my friend. So is God real to me. I feel that I have 
experienced His presence just as in church you some- 
times feel the benediction. It is not tangible and so 
neither vague nor distinct. I feel it and I trust my 
feelings." "I experience His presence as I expe- 
rience light and air, only it is more intimate as be- 
longing to my real, permanent self. It is difficult to 
express in words. It is like being aware of life or 
love. I cannot conceive of living without Him. 
He is my life. . . . These experiences do not affect 
me mentally or physically, if I understand the ques- 
tion, but spiritually almost always. The mere name 
of Christ gives me happiness. Sometimes as I think 
of Him I wish to break through the barriers and go 
nearer — to die so as to be more fully where He is. 
Yet it is not a St. Teresa ecstasy. I come nearer to 
that in very everyday moments when love conquers 
selfishness in some small way. Sometimes then I 
feel in heaven and one with Him. It is exquisite 
rest, but still silent ecstacy. Then I am alive and 
could never die. If this sounds mystical, I am a 
mystic. I know that I am. It all comes to me so." 
The same "sense of presence" described in some 
of the preceding responses, with the added feature of 
clearly spoken words, resembling St. Teresa's " locu- 
tions," is seen in the following: "The experience of 



TYPES OF BELIEF IN MATURE LIFE 257 

His presence was as definite as the sense of touching 
an external object, but the sensation seemed to come, 
so to speak, from within instead of from without. 
Still, the personality was clearly distinct from myself 

— and from any detached segment or substratum 
of myself. An illustration of this separate action is 
in the fact that the other personality could speak 
to me in words clearly enunciated but without sound. 
This silent form of speech . . . had the convincing 
force of a new revelation to me." 

The experience is described in a number of other 
ways, some rather indefinite, but most of them em- 
phasizing its intense nature. As for instance the fol- 
lowing : " God is to me more real than all else besides 

— I am thrilled and filled with His love at times." 
" Yes, He is more real than any earthly friend. The 
feeling is deeper, calmer, larger. There is a repose 
and a constancy about it nothing else equals." 
"His presence in my thought is uplifting and helpful 
to mind and body. It is as distinct as the effect of 
tea or coffee." 

The appearance of the outer world is sometimes 
changed — a phenomenon that commonly accom- 
panies any sudden emotional disturbance, as con- 
version or love. "He gave me a bright revelation 
of Himself ; even the grass and trees looked, oh, so 
beautiful." 

Joy and intense love are common characteristics 
of the experience, the thought of God's greatness 
and majesty seldom entering the mind at the time. 



258 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

God is a Companion, the "Lover of my soul," etc. 
— it is the personal rather than the cosmical aspects 
of the concept that are of importance. The latter, 
however, are sometimes of considerable influence, as 
in the following: "Although I believe at all times 
that God is great, good, omnipresent, etc., and that I 
am actually in communication with Him when I 
choose to be, it is only at intervals, and rare at that, 
that I realize what it means to be in such a situation. 
The feeling is then one of awe and exaltation as 
nearly as I can express it, and on the occasion when 
I can remember to have had the most vivid experi- 
ence of this kind, it was so intense that I could only 
ask to have it taken away; it was almost crushing." 

Clearer intellectual vision and a strengthened moral 
purpose are frequently mentioned among the effects 
of the experience. The two following responses, 
though illustrating a number of other matters, are 
here in point : — 

" God is a very real presence to me. I feel that He 
is present with me at all times, only occasionally do 
I have an experience that seems particularly clear. 
It is usually at a time which seems critical to my 
development, when an influence may turn the course 
of my life from one extreme to another. At such 
crises I am conscious of an increase of power and will 
which makes stronger my determination to press for- 
ward toward righteousness. I hear no voice, I see 
no light or person, — but I feel an assurance that the 
course toward which I feel drawn is that which is 



TYPES OF BELIEF IN MATURE LIFE 259 

best. Mentally I receive courage and a clearer vision, 
an added power of will, and a purer thought ; physi- 
cally I have the common results of courage, a care- 
lessness of pain, or of mental anguish, that enables 
me to reach an end that otherwise I am assured I 
should not attain. At these crises the experience is 
very real and distinct." 

"At times God is very real to me. At such times 
He seems nearer and more real than any human being 
could be. At other times He seems real but more 
or less remote. There have been times throughout 
my life, beginning in early childhood, when I have 
believed myself to come consciously into the presence 
of God. Sometimes this has occurred when I have 
been in great sorrow or in great fear and dread. But 
sometimes I have felt this Presence without any spe- 
cial reason for it, — e.g., when I have been alone out 
of doors or reading something that has touched me 
by its beauty and truth, I have felt a quick, glad 
sense that He was near, ' closer to me than breathing, 
nearer than hands or feet.' Such experiences while 
they last make me feel that I have come to my true 
self. I seem to understand life better for them. 
They are accompanied by no emotional excitement, 
only by a deep peace and gladness. I have never 
spoken of them to any one. These experiences are 
not habitual with me, that is, they do not occur very 
frequently. They afford me my strongest ground for 
belief in God." 

At this point it will be profitable to revert to the 



260 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

distinction made in Chapters V and VII between the 
two types of religious feeling — the abnormal excite- 
ment, and the calm and spontaneous emotion. If, 
with this distinction in mind, we look through the 
descriptions of religious feeling given by my respon- 
dents, we shall find that with one or two possible ex- 
ceptions they all belong to the second or calmer type. 
The religious experience of the mature and cul- 
tured mind is at the antipodes from the excitement 
of the revival meeting. It seems to differ from it in 
kind rather than in degree. For in its own way it is 
as intense and brings as strong a sense of conviction 
as do any of the more extravagant forms of religious 
intoxication. It puts one's faith upon a plane supe- 
rior to all argument. He who has once known it can 
never altogether forget it ; he feels that he has had 
at least one glimpse into a new dimension of being. 
It is not to be described, but only to be experienced ; 
a language which all the initiate — and only they — 
may speak or understand. This, at least, is the al- 
most universal assertion of those who claim to have 
known this thing. With Browning's Abt Vogler they 
say: — 

" God has a few of us whom He whispers in the ear; 

The rest may reason and welcome; 'tis we musicians know." 

One of my respondents writes: "I find others have 
experience which makes them understand mine with- 
out explanation. A certain instinctive comprehen- 
sion exists, though in matters of taste, education, 



TYPES OF BELIEF IN MATURE LIFE 261 

and temperament we may be quite far apart. There 
seems to be a common language of the soul learned 
through a life not possible to utter in words." 

In looking over the results recorded in this chapter 
one should note in particular that the data here col- 
lected, if at all trustworthy, point decidedly to the 
great preponderance of affective experience over rea- 
soning and authority as the basis of belief. The re- 
searches of Leuba and Starbuck, so far as they touch 
upon this question, point in the same direction. The 
importance of the affective life in the religious belief 
of my respondents is especially striking if we consider 
only those whom I have called the "church people," 
32 out of 55 being of the mystic type, while all but 8 
of the 55 were persuaded that they had experienced 
God's presence. If my respondents are really fair 
samples (as I believe them to be), we may conclude 
that belief in God to-day, with a large proportion 
of the religious community, is based, not on argument 
nor on authority, but on a private experience springing 
from that great background region of our conscious- 
ness which I have called the feeling mass, and which 
is so intimately bound up with life and all that life 
means. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE VALUE OF GOD 

We have in a very general and incomplete manner 
traced the belief in God both in the race and in the 
individual. The question naturally presents itself : 
What is the present value of this belief ? If it should 
die out, would it be a real loss? What does God do 
for people ? 

The question of the value of religious belief to the 
community at large has been discussed frequently 
and at length, and I have nothing whatever to add, 
at this point, to the discussion. The answers to my 
questionnaire do, however, throw some light on the 
value of God to the individual, and it is this which 
I mean to deal with, quite briefly, in the present 
chapter. 



And first of all, what do people mean by God? 
The question in my circular (question 2) which 
concerns itself with this, was, on the whole, not very 
successful. In fact I had anticipated this result, for 
it, more than any of the others, was of a nature to put 
the mind into an unnatural position. Still some of 

262 



THE VALUE OF GOD 263 

the more general results of this question are, I be- 
lieve, both significant and trustworthy. Out of the 
74 who answered it 71 believed in some kind of 
God, and of these 71 all but 3 insisted that their God 
was personal. Personality was usually denned as 
the possession of thought, feeling, and will. Farther 
than this the anthropomorphic tendency seldom went. 
More than half of the answers were, of course, de- 
cidedly conventional in tone and seemed to reflect 
little independent thought. But one result of the 
answers as a whole that seems fairly clear is that 
God's "attributes" play a comparatively unim- 
portant part in the minds of religious people, and 
that His relation to individuals is the really important 
factor in the concept. People are chiefly interested 
not in what God is, but in what He can do. Two- 
thirds of my respondents describe Him as "Father," 
"Friend," "Companion," "the ally of my ideals," 
or by some equivalent expression; while only 12 
thought it worth while to mention the fact that He is 
omnipotent, 9 called Him Creator, 3 mentioned Him 
as the Trinity, and one as the " Great First Cause." 
Doubtless most of my respondents, if asked whether 
God were all these latter things, would respond Yes ; 
the significant fact is that these attributes play so un- 
important a part in their conception of Him that 
when asked to define that conception these attributes 
never enter their minds. Professor Leuba seems to 
be right in the main when he says that God is used 
rather than understood ; the religious consciousness 



264 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

cares little who God is, but wants to make use of 
Him for various ends. 1 

While the concept of God is, however, in one sense 
decidedly pragmatic, it would be a mistake to suppose 
that the ends for which the religious consciousness 
wishes to use God are chiefly ordinary utilitarian ends 
— such as protector, "meat purveyor," etc. Unless 
my respondents are very unusual people, the chief 
use for which God is desired is distinctly social 
rather than material. God is valued as an end in 
Himself rather than as a means to other ends. Most 
people want God for the same reason for which they 
want friends, and His relation to them is exactly that 
of a very dear and very lovable and very sympathiz- 
ing friend. It is quite naive, no doubt, but perfectly 
simple. Thus 53 out of 73 of my respondents affirm 
that God is as real to them as an earthly friend. 
Doubtless some of the 53 answered as they did in a 
purely conventional spirit, but that this was not the 
case with more than a small proportion is shown by 
the general tone of the answers to the other questions. 
The God whom most people want and whom many 
people have is a very real and sympathizing friend. 
Like other friends he is, to be sure, not only an end in 
Himself, but a means to other ends ; He can help one 
to many things that one wants. These things, how- 
ever, are as a rule not material benefits. They are 
chiefly of three kinds : comfort in trouble, hope for the 
future, and assistance in striving after righteousness. 

1 "The Contents of Religious Consciousness, " Monist, XI, 
57i. 



THE VALUE OF GOD 265 

II 

I can best convey an idea of the value of God to 
religious people and of the things that He does for 
them by quoting a few of the answers to question 
4, which was as follows: "If you should be- 
come thoroughly convinced that there was no God, 
would it make any great difference in your life — 
either in happiness, morality, or in other respects?" 
I asked this question, not with the purpose of learning 
what would be the result of such a loss of faith, — 
for that, of course, no one knows and many of the 
respondents have doubtless greatly overestimated 
the actual result, — but in order to see just how 
much value believing people attribute to their 
belief. 

In passing I will say that of the 50 who answered 
this question definitely, 40 affirmed that the loss of 
belief would diminish their happiness, 25 said it 
would undermine or weaken their morality, and 6 
anticipated no difference in either way. I attribute no 
special significance to these exact figures, of course ; 
it is the spirit and general tone of the answers that 
are significant, and they will speak for themselves. 
I set down here some of the most typical. "If it 
were proven to me that there was no God, it would 
make no difference in my morality or manner of liv- 
ing, or happiness when everything is going all right. 
When trouble comes it would." "It would make 
no difference in morality. I have known times when 



266 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

if I did not believe I would have been unhappy. 
At these times I did want help. . . . When I need 
Him, He is real ; at other times not." In these cases 
God is used only to help out in emergencies, and then 
in a purely extraneous manner. He is a means, not 
an end. Somewhat similar in tone, though profounder 
in thought, is the following : " I do not think it would 
make a tremendous difference in my life if I could also 
think that good is good and not illusion, that any way 
we are striving for a cause, that progress is something 
real. But if we were to disappear to-morrow and 
not a thought or a result be left, even if God exists, I 
do not care to struggle. . . . Can we look forward ? 
That is the only question. But if there is no God, 
I don't see how we can." 

That God should be desired only or chiefly as 
a means of insuring to us something else, as in the 
cases just quoted, is the exception rather than the rule 
with truly religious natures. Much more common 
than the above are expressions like the following: 
"He is as much a necessity to my spiritual existence 
as the elements of pure air are to my physical system 
in the preservation of life and health." "If I were 
convinced there was no God, I fear a sense of loneli- 
ness would become intolerable." "It would be like 
blotting out the sun." " It would plunge me in dark- 
ness and despair, but no one could make me believe 
it, for I have the witness in myself." "If I became 
convinced that there was no God ... it would make 
the greatest difference in my life both in happiness, 



THE VALUE OF GOD 267 

which is largely dependent upon hope, and in morality. 
I should 'live, drink and be merry' with a vengeance 
and indulge myself in many excesses. I am sure of 
this." "I should go mad, I think. . . . There 
would be no I, no anything. He is the life of life to 
me, in everything making the vital meaning of even 
small things — flowers — all beauty. He is the 
hidden strength of my strength and the stay of my 
weakness — some one to understand me and to be 
there always, requiring, reproving, but loving." " If 
I should become convinced that there is no God, then 
life for me would not be worth living. All my ideas 
and ideals must needs undergo complete modification. 
I should have no zest for pleasure, no courage to 
bear pain, no aims in life. I should fear death, 
yet long for death to end the farce of living." "As 
for any repose or ability to face life and death with 
composure, any incentive to be perfect in things 
hidden from outsiders, any exhilaration in living 
and trying to do my best — I cannot conceive it 
without the idea of God. ... To live, on the 
contrary, with this constant feeling of common 
nature and common work with God is educative 
and constructive in itself, and gives, to me at least, 
in spite of innumerable shortcomings, the exhila- 
ration of untold attainments and possibilities in the 
future, and puts a dignity as well as a joy into 
everything." 

As I have said, it is quite probable that the results 
of loss of belief would not be so serious, either to 






268 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

happiness or to morality, as my respondents imag- 
ine. After a time things would shape themselves to- 
gether somehow. And yet there can be no doubt 
that the common belief in a personal and sympathetic 
God must be a great aid in the moral life. We are 
but children of a larger growth, and to support our 
feeble virtue most of us need the thought of an ideal 
divine friend who cares, in exactly the same way that 
the tempted child needs the thought of his mother. 
Many a man who would give no heed to the categori- 
cal imperative, will resolutely turn his back on temp- 
tation "for His sake." It was a profound saying of 
Voltaire that if there were no God, we should have to 
invent one. 

The happiness which is due to religious belief is, 
of course, in part owing to the many things which God, 
and God only, is conceived of as able to give. Espe- 
cially are immortality and the hope of seeing one's lost 
friends regarded as dependent on God ; hence loss of 
belief in Him would shatter the hopes which to many 
a religious soul are the dearest of all. Besides this, 
God is of use at times of crisis to give strength and 
help of various kinds. But though all this is true, I 
must repeat my former assertion, that the religious 
consciousness values God chiefly as a companion. 
The need of Him is a social need. Religious people 
would miss Him if they should lose their faith, just 
as they miss a dead friend. Of course, in one sense 
they would get over it, just as they get over missing 
their dearest dead. But the universe would still be 






THE VALUE OF GOD 269 

that much poorer, life that much less worth the living 
— and very much lonelier. The God-consciousness, 
even in its most superficial and conventional forms, 
is a defence against the feeling of utter loneliness and 
isolation that comes upon most of us at times. Be- 
tween me and my nearest friend there is a wall that 
can never be quite broken down — he can never 
really understand my feelings or know me as I am. 
Now, only the concept of a God who knows with an 
immediate knowledge — who has a co-experience 
with mine — can ward off this feeling. Hence one 
who is assured that He is closer than breathing, nearer 
than hands and feet, can never feel entirely forsaken 
or desolate ; for wherever he goes he believes that he 
carries his dearest friend with him. It must be 
noted, too, that God is desired not as an object of 
love merely, but also as one who loves in return. 
Says Professor Coe, " When Spinoza proposed a kind 
of love for God that made no demands upon God 
for a sympathetic response, he proposed something 
that never has met the needs of man and never can 
meet them." * 

Another social value of the concept of God is His 
character as the ultimate, unprejudiced, and abso- 
lutely infallible judge of my actions and my motives. 
He is the one to whom I may appeal for justification 
and appreciation in the last resource. Not outward 
justification this, not a setting right before the 

1 " The Spiritual Life." 



6^0 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

world ; but I know that if all men misjudge me, still 
there is One who sees my true motives, and who really 
understands me. Somewhere in the universe justice 
is done me, the truth about me is seen in its real light. 
One of my respondents describes religion as "the 
social appeal for corroboration, consolation, etc., 
when things are going wrong with my causes (my 
truth denied, etc.)." Another speaks of God as 
*'& real but invisible Presence that understands" 
(the emphasis is his). It is not the hope of immor- 
tality, but this deep assurance that, spite of the opin- 
ions of men, there is One who sees his real integrity, 
that is the only consolation of Job in his affliction. 
" But as for me I know that my Vindicator liveth." 
In speaking of the " social self" in his " Psychology," 
Professor James says: "The ideal social self which I 
thus seek . . . may be very remote ; it may be rep- 
resented as barely possible. I may not hope for 
its realization during my lifetime ; I may even expect 
the future generations, which would approve me if 
they knew me, to know nothing about me when I 
am dead and gone. Yet still the emotion that beck- 
ons me on is indubitably the pursuit of an ideal 
social self, of a self that is at least worthy of approv- 
ing recognition by the highest possible judging com- 
panion, if such companion there be. This self is the 
true, the intimate, the ultimate, the permanent Me 
which I seek. This judge is God, the Absolute Mind, 
the ' Great Companion.' ... All progress in the 
social self is the substitution of higher tribunals for 



THE VALUE OF GOD 271 

lower; this ideal tribunal is the highest; and most 
men, either continually or occasionally, carry a ref- 
erence to it in their breast. The humblest outcast 
on this earth can feel himself to be real and valid by 
means of this higher recognition. And, on the other 
hand, for most of us, a world with no such inner refuge 
when the outer social self failed and dropped from us 
would be the abyss of horror." * 

III 

Still more light will be thrown on the value of God 
to the religious consciousness by a study of prayer; 
for, as Sabatier says, "Prayer is religion in act — 
that is to say, real religion. It is prayer which dis- 
tinguishes religious phenomena from all those which 
resemble them or lie near to them, from the moral 
sense, for instance, or aesthetic feeling." 2 

Question 6 of my questionnaire read as follows : 
" Do you pray, and if so, why ? That is, is it purely 
from habit and social custom, or do you feel that God 
hears your prayers? Is prayer with you one-sided 
or two-sided — i.e. do you sometimes feel that in 
prayer you receive something — such as strength or 
the divine spirit — from God ? Is it a real com- 
munion?" 

The answers to this question indicate that while 
in nearly all cases prayer begins as a habit inculcated 

1 "Principles of Psychology," Vol. I, pp. 315, 316. 

2 "Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion" (English translation), 
p. 27. 



272 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

upon the child, it is kept up chiefly — almost entirely 
— for other reasons. Out of my 72 respondents to 
this question, 68 pray, and only 13 of these mention 
habit as having anything to do with it. All but one 
or two of these 13, moreover, speak of habit as a very 
subordinate element in their prayers. I need hardly 
say that I attribute very little significance to these exact 
figures and mention them only to show in a general 
way the importance which my respondents assign to 
habit in this connection. The following answer 
probably shows the true place of habit in the prayers 
of most religious people: "Prayer has doubtless 
become a habit with me to a great extent through early 
training, and yet that was but the beginning I am sure, 
for other things in which I was trained are aban- 
doned if the necessity for them vanishes, while the 
habit of prayer becomes stronger the longer I live." 
The real reason why people pray is well expressed 
by the same respondent. " I believe I pray because I 
can't help it. It is almost an instinct, and however 
it would have been with different training, I could no 
more help praying now than thinking." 1 Another 
writes, "I pray because when I feel especially joyful 
I simply have to thank God." To quote again 
from Professor James: "We hear, in these days of 
scientific enlightenment, a great deal of discussion 

1 Cf. Guimaraens, "Le Besoin de Prier:" "II n'est autre 
qu'un etat affectif, tin besoin affectif, 'primum movens' . . . 
partant d'origines fort complexes, surgissant des profondeurs de 
tout notre etre." Rev. Phil., LIV, 391-412. 



THE VALUE OF GOD 273 

about the efficacy of prayer; and many reasons are 
given us why we should not pray, whilst others are 
given us why we should. But in all this very little 
is said of the reason why we do pray, which is simply 
that we cannot help praying. It seems probable that, 
in spite of all that ' science ' may do to the contrary, 
men will continue to pray to the end of time, unless 
their mental nature changes in a manner which noth- 
ing we know should lead us to expect. The impulse 
to pray is a necessary consequence of the fact that 
whilst the innermost of the empirical selves of a man 
is a self of the social sort, it yet can find its only ade- 
quate Socius in an ideal world." * 

The answer given to my question by a large pro- 
portion of the respondents is: "I pray because God 
hears." Nearly all feel very sure that prayer is two- 
sided, and insist that they receive something from 
God by means of it. 2 A few use God in prayer to get 
certain definite things that they want. One woman 
regained her lost son as an immediate answer to 
prayer. In another case, where a woman lost her 
glasses out of the car window, God found them and 
returned them by means of the conductor. 

But cases like these are rare. Not many people 
use God to find their children and their spectacles. 



1 "Psychology," Vol. I, p. 316. 

2 Cf. a "Study of Prayer," by F. O. Beck, in the Jour, of 
Rel. Psy. and Fed. for March, 1906. Nearly 70 per cent of Mr. 
Beck's respondents "state that they feel the presence of a higher 
power while in the act of praying" (p. 118). 

T 



274 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

So far as He is regarded (pragmatically) as a giver 
at all, it is strength and insight and comfort that He 
gives. That these things do come from prayer is an 
empirical fact recognized by many people who are 
theoretically quite skeptical. 1 A scientific friend of 
mine who, though he has lost most of his old religious 
belief, still prays at times, tells me: a Even now I get 
comfort after them; ' things ' go better. Possibly 
that may be a change in my attitude toward the 
things." Another scientist writes, "I pray largely 
from habit ; yet in time of trouble there is lots of com- 
fort in struggling my best and throwing the respon- 
sibility on Him." The following is from a skeptical 
friend who very seldom prays at all: "I have diffi- 
culty in conceiving the something I am naming God 
coherently enough to call a single being of any sort. 
But I think at rare intervals I have experienced some- 
thing like a movement of God toward me. It 
generally happens when I stop righting and rely on 
assistance. For example, lately before going into 
a trial which threatened to involve me in personal 
dishonor I prayed 'like a kid,' and seemed to get 

1 Cf. W. C. Brownell's article on Matthew Arnold: "The 
influence of the Holy Spirit, exquisitely called the Comforter, is 
a matter of actual experience, as solid a reality as that of electro- 
magnetism." Scribner's, XXX, 112. (Quoted also in James' 
"Varieties," p. 515.) Cf. also Mr. Beck's "Study of Prayer." 
Almost all his respondents feel the "manifestation of unusual 
power" through prayer, though they are about equally divided 
on the question whether this power comes from without or from 
within. 



THE VALUE OF GOD 275 

response immediately. The physical result was 
immediate quieting of nerves. Mentally it gave me 
a lot of courage." Another friend writes, "I don't 
know how much God knows about my prayers, but 
am sure that / am benefited." Still another : " Yes, 
I pray for strength to obey the laws of nature which 
are the laws of God. . . . To pray for help may not 
bring help from God, but it keeps in mind the need 
of strength, hence the strength comes." "I pray 
because I feel that by so doing my moral life is up- 
lifted, i.e. negatively I resist temptation I would not 
otherwise, and positively I feel more strength to do 
good work. My greater or less willingness to pray is 
like the thermometer of my whole activity. If I do 
not or cannot pray, I know I am pretty low down." 
I have quoted these cases at length to show that 
even doubt does not destroy the efficacy of prayer. 
Whatever these persons may think about God in 
moments of speculation and however they may 
explain their experience, in hours of emergency they 
use their God just as other people do and are perfectly 
certain of the practical benefit. If these people re- 
ceive help, a fortiori do those whose faith is troubled 
by no doubts. "The help is very practical," writes 
one woman. "Many times as a teacher I have gone 
to the classroom utterly unequal to the work, or to 
meet a crisis, and depending entirely on the promise 
of wisdom and strength to be given. At such times 
I have done my best and most successful work." 
Another woman writes: "In this matter more than 



276 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

in the other things about which you have asked, I 
rest on personal evidence. In time of perplexity 
about important matters I have found my judgment 
clarified and my decision shaping itself as a result of 
prayer, in much the same way that I have found my- 
self affected by consultation with a wise friend. . . . 
I have still the feeling that I am left to make up my 
own mind but that my mind is working at its best. . . . 
I know that prayer makes possible the carrying of 
heavy burdens with serenity, and doing one's ordi- 
nary work with an undivided mind in spite of anxiety 
and sorrow. I know that prayer creates an atmos- 
phere of the spirit, an elevation above pettiness and 
irritation, a warmth of affection for others, and a 
triumph over selfishness that no amount of philoso- 
phizing or reasoning with one's self can produce." 1 
But, after all, the religious consciousness seems 
to value prayer, not so much for the benefits which it 
believes God gives in answer, as because it feels as- 

1 Cf. an article in the Outlook for August 11, 1906, entitled 
"The Art of Prayer." The writer speaks of his own experience 
thus: "Times without number, in moments of supreme doubt, 
disappointment, discouragement, unhappiness, a certain prayer- 
formula, which by degrees has built itself up in my mind, has been 
followed in its utterance by quick and astonishing relief. Some- 
times doubt has been transformed into confident assurance, mental 
weakness utterly routed by strength, self-distrust changed into 
self-confidence, fear into courage, dismay into confident and 
brightest hope. These transitions have sometimes come by de- 
grees — in the course, let us say, of an hour or two ; at other times 
they have been instantaneous, flashing up in brain and heart as 
if a powerful electric stroke had cleared the air." 



THE VALUE OF GOD 277 

sured that by means of it one comes into an immediate 
social relationship with God. Dr. J. R. Illingworth, 
in his recent book entitled " Christian Character," 
says of prayer: "Its human analogue is not petition, 
but intercourse with a friend. Primarily we desire 
such intercourse as an end in itself, simply because our 
friend is our friend, and the fact of converse with 
him manifests and satisfies our friendship." More 
than half of my respondents insist that prayer is to 
them a real communion. Not all conceive the power 
with whom they commune in thoroughly anthropo- 
morphic terms ; for some prayer opens a door into a 
larger life, a source of strength, not further to be de- 
fined. Yet for all, this larger life is sufficiently like 
our own for one's relation to it to be conceived in 
social terms. It is not as a Giver but as a Compan- 
ion that God is chiefly valued and sought for in 
prayer. "Essentially," writes one man, "I pray 
to enjoy a higher communion than is possible for me 
with any human soul." "Prayer is to spiritual life 
what breathing is to natural life." "I pray because 
I want to and like to, and feel that God understands, 
and I like the sympathy of it." "Prayer is natural, 
not one-sided. I feel that there is an interchange 
of something, I know not what, between me and that 
unseen, but felt-to-be-present, being." "I pray — 
not in set terms very much — but I turn to God in all 
places and at all times, more or less, and I have felt 
real communion, hindered or dulled often by tired 
nerves or a whirlwind of emotion more earthly, 



278 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

or by sin more often, but I sometimes have it ; and 
more constantly if not quite communion, yet a strong 
dimmed sense of response — something I cannot quite 
hold, but feel." 

The results from my various questions as bearing 
upon the value of God would, therefore, seem to point 
all one way. God is valued, not as an explanation 
of things and an assistance to the understanding, but 
rather as an immediate help in the practical and emo- 
tional life. And while it is true that He is used rather 
than understood, it is not so much His gifts as Himself 
that is longed for and desired by the deeply religious 
soul. It is an utterly mistaken view to suppose, as 
Professor Leuba does, that the religious mind " cares 
very little who God is, or even whether He is at all." 
The tone of my answers shows this clearly enough. 
To be sure, they care little enough about His meta- 
physical attributes ; but to His real existence and to 
His social and personal relation to them they do 
cling with passionate earnestness. "Not God," says 
Leuba, "but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satis- 
fying life, is in the last analysis the end of religion." 
If God be taken to mean the collection of abstract 
attributes set up by scholasticism and maintained 
by an antiquated theology, this is true. But taken 
in any other sense it is profoundly untrue. "A 
larger, richer life" is indeed the «nd of religion; 
but this larger life religion everywhere identifies 
with what it means by its God. It feels assured by its 
own deepest experiences that this larger life is near it, 



THE VALUE OF GOD 279 

around it, and that one may draw from this illimitable 
source new strength for one's own needs. It recog- 
nizes this larger life as not differing essentially in 
nature from its own ; and it calls it God. This God 
it values chiefly for what He is — not as "meat pur- 
veyor" but as a " larger, richer, more satisfying life," 
and one with which the little life knows by its vital 
experiences that it may make connection. 



CHAPTER X 

CONCLUSION 

Since taking leave of the first two chapters we 
have been forced to wander rather far afield in the 
realms of racial and individual history, and I fear 
the reader may at times have felt uncertain of his 
bearings and have been unable to see the forest for 
the trees. Yet if the subject was to be treated in any- 
thing but a most superficial and sketchy manner, a 
somewhat detailed study of the facts seemed neces- 
sary. At length, however, we have reached a point 
where our attention need no longer be monopolized 
by the details of the journey and from which we may 
get a wider and more general survey of the whole 
course of our wanderings and take stock of what we 
have gained since first we started on our travels. 

I 

The most salient feature of such a retrospective 
view is the relation and comparative importance of 
the three chief types of religious belief. The Religion 
of Primitive Credulity is found at its best in the child- 
hood of the race and the childhood of the individual, 
— among the naive and unsophisticated who accept 

280 



CONCLUSION 28l 

the presented because it is presented, in accordance 
with the natural, innate reaction of the mind. Even 
after the possibility of doubt has long been recog- 
nized, religious faith often rests chiefly upon an 
authority which makes appeal to no argument and 
no experience, but merely to the mind's natural and 
primitive credulity. To accept one's theology ready- 
made from others in this uncritical manner was for 
ages almost universally regarded as the proper and 
only thing to do ; the tendency to do so was in the 
air that one breathed and was hardly to be resisted. 
Such, however, is no longer the case. Belief from 
authority is by no means in the air to-day. Nor is this 
true merely of religious matters ; there is a general 
reaction against uncritical acceptance of the authority 
of tradition in all fields of thought. To say nothing 
of popular science and philosophy, and to take only 
one example from many, the critical tendency is 
strikingly obvious in the present status of the political 
ideas which we in America have received from our 
fathers. Fifty years ago no one thought it possible 
to question the inspired nature of the Declaration 
of Independence; but the political higher critic of 
to-day has not hesitated to make its claims to infalli- 
bility and plenary inspiration an object of attack and 
sometimes even of ridicule. In like manner the wis- 
dom of the Monroe Doctrine is often denied, and 
one does not have to go far to hear it seriously ques- 
tioned whether the Revolution was not a mistake and 
whether national independence is of any real value. 



282 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

These new views are not due to any new data nor to 
any new powers of reasoning developed in the present 
generation, but rather to the psychological atmosphere 
of the times. To accept without criticism what we 
have been taught and what our fathers have believed 
is no longer the thing to do. I do not say this is an 
age of doubt and scepticism, but it is an age of free 
inquiry and independent thought. It accepts much 
on the authority of experts, but tries to accept nothing 
on the authority of tradition or without a reason. 

So it is with religion. Belief from authority in 
the sense of a reasoned belief is still important and 
doubtless will always be so. But belief from author- 
ity in the sense of primitive credulity is meeting with 
tremendous losses year by year and day by day. 
Thousands among the most orthodox are beginning 
to wake up to the fact that they do not really believe 
what they thought they did and that many of the old 
dogmas to which they have adhered merely because of 
early teaching must soon go by the board. An ac- 
quaintance of mine, a good Presbyterian elder, well 
expressed the attitude of these people when he re- 
marked, not long ago, "I can see plainly enough that 
the time is coming when I shall have to believe what 
I believe." 

An instance of this new spirit of independence in 
religion is to be seen in the cold or even hostile atti- 
tude which the laboring classes are beginning to as- 
sume toward the Church, the world over. It was 
among them that the Religion of Primitive Credulity 



CONCLUSION 283 

used formerly to find the great mass of its adherents, 
and their rebellion against it (for no other term seems 
quite adequate) is a most serious blow to it and a most 
significant fact for us. If the Religion of Primitive 
Credulity loses its hold over the uncultivated and 
illiterate, it must shrink to a very second-rate factor 
in the religious life of the world. To be sure, it will 
always count among its adherents all children brought 
up under religious influences ; but the great majority 
of these it will regularly lose as they come to years 
of independent thought; and though it is unlikely 
that the day will ever come when it will cease to play 
a subordinate part in the lives of all of us, that part 
will be increasingly subordinate as the years go by, 
and it will soon cease to rank as a peer of the other 
forms of religious belief dealt with in this book. The 
old world has at last outgrown its childhood and 
must put away childish things. We need therefore 
consider this primitive form of belief no further but 
shall turn at once to our final consideration and 
evaluation of the Religion of Thought and the Reli- 
gion of Feeling. 

II 

Throughout the course of our study I have tried 
to show the great importance of both the intellectual 
and the affective elements of the mind in their rela- 
tion to religion, as well as some of the historical and 
psychological reasons which in my judgment point to 
the affective element as much the more fundamental 



284 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

of the two. I do not wish to be understood as assign- 
ing no value to thought in religion. Without thought, 
all belief in anything that could be called divine would 
be so vague that it could never be referred to, much 
less communicated and inculcated, and it would 
therefore cease altogether to have social value. The 
result would be that, except for a detached mystic here 
and there, it would die out in a generation. To exist, 
belief must be made articulate, and for this purpose 
thought is essential. 

Neither should the great importance and value of 
authority be overlooked. And here I refer to au- 
thority in its more intellectualistic sense, as a special 
kind of argument. As such it must inevitably — • 
and very properly — have great influence in main- 
taining faith throughout adult life. As Balfour has 
pointed out, most of our beliefs are based on au- 
thority. 1 And it is quite fitting that this should have 
its influence on religious beliefs as well as on others. 
With the spread of critical study of the Bible and of 
Church dogma, however, authority in religion will 
lose its absolute and dictatory character. The day 
will never return when the Bible can be considered 
as authority in the first sense of the word — an abso- 
lute and unquestionable authority. There are no 
longer any absolute authorities. On the other hand, 
the day will never come when the Bible will cease to 
be an authority — and a most powerful one — in the 

1 "Foundations of Belief," pp. 202-238. 



CONCLUSION 285 

second sense of the word. The insight of its writers 
and its heroes has been too profound for that, its 
pages are too glowing and too luminous with spiritual 
light, the sources of its streams too deep in the life 
of the race, for it ever to fail in its ministrations to the 
passing generations of mankind. It is so religious 
a book and so human a book that its authority 
over the hearts of men can never be lost so long as 
men remain truly religious and truly human. But 
authority in matters of religion has ceased to be 
confined to the Bible or to any book or church or 
explicit formulation, and is becoming, in reality, a 
general argument from the experience of all those 
whose spiritual life has been deep and influential, 
whether in the Bible or out of it. It must be noted 
in passing, moreover, that arguments from authority 
such as this will draw all their strength ultimately 
from the affective experience. 

In one other way, moreover, religion will always 
need the aid of thought, namely, to protect it from 
dangers of a purely intellectual nature. There are 
certain anti-religious beliefs which take particularly 
strong hold on the popular imagination and with 
which critical thought can very well deal. The best 
example of these is, of course, materialism, and the 
service which reason has rendered to religion in ward- 
ing off its attack is of great importance. Thanks to 
it, materialism scarcely poses any longer as a serious 
attempt completely to explain the universe. Haeckel 
stands almost alone in defending it. His courage 



286 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

is as admirable as that of the boy who stood 
on the burning deck, " whence all but him had 
fled." 

But it is not only against external foes that religion 
needs protection; it must be safeguarded as well 
against the inherent diseases to which it is specially 
liable, against the deadening influence of traditional 
and stagnant creeds which have long since outgrown 
their significance and their usefulness. We say that 
religion is at a crisis to-day ; and I believe this is pro- 
foundly true. But the more deeply one studies the 
history of religion the more one is struck with the fact 
that religion is always at a crisis. There has never 
been a period of human progress that has not been 
critical for religion. And I believe a careful consid- 
eration of the causes of this fact will show that this 
must always be the case so long as human thought 
maintains a healthy growth. For every advance 
in thought necessarily demands a corresponding ad- 
vance in religious conceptions or religious imagery. 
And the religion which lacks adaptability to the new 
thought of the times, the religion which remains 
rigid, inelastic, fixed in its traditional formulations 
and bound forever to a dead past, must inevitably 
go to the wall. This was the fate of the formalistic 
religion of the Brahmans in India and of the for- 
malistic faith of the Romans. This was the fate 
even of the beautiful religion of the Greeks; for, 
though it was far removed from rigidity and authori- 
tative formulation, it was by its very nature funda- 



CONCLUSION 287 

mentally incapable of keeping pace with the develop- 
ment of Greek thought-. It lacked depth and sub- 
stance and was unable, without absolute transforma- 
tion, to develop into a religion that could satisfy the 
spiritual and intellectual demands of the later Greek 
world. The reformation of the religion of Israel 
under Amos, described on pages 122-127, is another 
case in point. Had not the Hebrew conception of 
Yahweh been enlarged and adapted to the new condi- 
tions, his worship would have been wiped from the 
face of the earth and from the memories of men, and 
he would mean no more to us to-day than Chemosh 
of the Moabites. And so it must be with every faith. 
Among every people that thinks religion must always 
be at a crisis ; for progress is the life of thought and 
crisis is essential to the life of religion. It must for- 
ever be sloughing off an old shell and growing a new 
one. The shell indeed is important ; but woe to the 
religion which identifies its life with its shell, or re- 
fuses to part with its shell when this has ceased to be 
a protection and has become a clamping, choking 
incumbrance to the growth of its inner life. If Chris- 
tianity had identified itself with the Ptolemaic doctrine 
that the earth is stationary, it would have perished 
long ago; for, as Galileo is said to have whispered 
under his breath at the time of his recantation, "It 
moves just the same!" Yes, it moves just the 
same, and so do the thoughts of men. And if Chris- 
tianity to-day should identify itself with the infalli- 
bility of the Scriptures, or with the Creation according 



2«8 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

to Genesis, or with any of the dogmas of Christology, 
it would condemn itself to swift decay. It must be 
broad and great enough to accept all that science 
and criticism have to say and brave enough to face 
the whole truth and the whole future without fear. 
In short, the very life of religion depends upon its 
being able to distinguish between those things which 
for its age are essentials and those which may be 
parted with as non-essentials; upon its being able 
to adapt itself to the ever advancing thought of its 
time. And to do this it must of course look to 
thought itself for help. In thus formulating and re- 
formulating the conceptions of religion in conformity 
with the progress of human knowledge and reflection, 
reason will ever find a most useful sphere in the ser- 
vice of religion. 

It may even be admitted that, for the few philo- 
sophically minded, thought may of itself furnish a 
belief thoroughly satisfying and may possibly even 
reach the absolute truth. I am not contending 
against the validity of idealism. To be sure, its 
disciples are few, most of them disagree with each 
other as to what idealism is, and the great majority 
of them in all probability owe their philosophic creeds 
as much to the aesthetic or the mystical side of the 
idealistic Weltanschauung as to any logical compul- 
sion. Still, I will not deny that some philosophers 
may have reached the absolute truth of things, and 
this by reasoning alone. The paucity of their num- 
ber is of course no disproof of their doctrine. In 



CONCLUSION 289 

questions of truth and falsehood it is irrelevant to 
count heads. 

But in looking for a firm basis for religion it is not 
irrelevant to count heads. A subtile argument which 
only a score of the most brilliant philosophers can 
appreciate and accept can never form a foundation 
for the faith of a people. And when the popular and 
easily comprehensible arguments are overthrown 
(as I have tried in Chapter VI to show has been the 
case), then thought must cease to figure as an original 
source and an independent basis of religious belief. 

To this, of course, the answer naturally suggests 
itself that perhaps "the people" may be educated up 
to "Philosophy." But what, after all, is "Philoso- 
phy"? Does it mean Hegel or Hume, Thomas 
Aquinas, or Thomas Huxley? Read any thorough 
and unprejudiced History of Philosophy, such as 
Windelband's, and what is the impression at the end ? 
Great advances have indeed been made, crude and 
naive ideas have been rationalized, truly new and 
original conceptions have been advanced, the thoughts 
of the early philosophers have been carried to their 
logical conclusions and their presuppositions dis- 
covered and clearly exhibited. We are much less 
naive than our fathers were, and we have a much 
more intelligent grasp of the nature of the mind and 
of the mind's problem than they had. In short, real 
and undeniable progress has been made in Philosophy 
as in most things else. Yet if it come to a question 
of definite results, of problems surely solved and per- 



290 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF JRELIGIOUS BELIEF 

plexing questions forever laid to rest, one must feel 
indeed somewhat chagrined. The long list of splen- 
did names of which Philosophy boasts makes the 
sorry little sum of definitely demonstrated and gen- 
erally accepted philosophical truth seem meager in 
the extreme. How much farther along are we, one 
may well ask, toward really settling the problems and 
coming to any definite and thoroughly satisfactory 
conclusion than the Greeks were? The tendency 
toward skepticism is just about as strong as in the 
days of the Sophists, but no stronger. Neither 
the theists nor the atheists have been able to prove 
their point to the satisfaction of the other. Idealism 
and realism are still having it out. We are about 
as far from knowing what Reality is as we ever were. 
What has metaphysics really settled ? Does it stand 
for anything in particular ? If you tell me that a man 
has been converted to Christianity, I know in a general 
way what you mean. If you should tell me he had 
been converted to Philosophy, would you be saying 
anything at all ? 

Ill 

In abandoning reason as a sufficient basis for reli- 
gion, we are forced back on the region of feeling and 
of instinctive and unreasoned demands and intui- 
tions. Here must Religion take up her stand and 
make her fight. From this quarter she must draw 
her chief supplies or be starved into surrender. Is 
this region " sufficient for these things"? 



CONCLUSION 29I 

In Chapters VIII and IX I tried to show that 
among a large portion of religious people to-day 
the experience of the affective life is the real basis of 
belief. But how is this possible ? Is not belief, it will 
be asked, in the last analysis an intellectual assent, 
and if so, is not feeling entirely irrelevant, except 
perhaps as a datum for an argument ? 

My answer to this question has, of course, been 
given in Chapter II. If I was right in my analysis 
of belief, intellectual assent is only one species of it, 
emotional conviction or reality feeling being an 
equally common and important type. The former 
kind — the recognition of the truth of a proposition — 
is a matter of the intellect alone; an unembodied 
spirit of pure thought, without emotions or wishes or 
impulses or interests, would possess beliefs of this 
kind and of this kind only. Mathematical truths 
are the best examples. I believe that the sum of the 
angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles; I 
recognize the truth of this proposition. The other 
psychical state denoted by the term "belief" is less 
a matter of the intellect than of the whole psycho- 
physical organism. It is voluntaristic rather than 
intellectual. It is a demand rather than a recogni- 
tion. Our hypothetical disembodied spirit whose life 
consists of "retries Denizen" could not conceive this 
kind of belief, nor could its nature ever be explained 
to him. It is in a different world from his. It is 
not an awareness, but an attitude, and is based, not 
on an argument, but on a demand. 



292 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

Most of our practical beliefs are of this nature. 
While occupied with mathematics or logic we may 
live in a world of pure reason, but no sooner do we 
rise from our work than we find ourselves in a world 
of very mixed reason, where will attitudes take the 
place of pure awareness. Our nature is such that 
pure thought is seldom possible; and the man who 
tries to be guided in all his beliefs and all his actions 
by reason alone, and always inhibits the affective, 
impulsive factors, is very generally and rightly known 
as a crank. 

Beliefs based upon feeling or upon demands are, of 
course, of different degrees of strength according to 
the force and nature of the demand out of which 
they spring. They vary all the way from compara- 
tively superficial matters in which we say a the wish 
is father to the thought " to those inborn beliefs which 
are the reciprocal terms to certain instinctive and 
native impulses. As said in Chapter II, our instinc- 
tive demands refuse to admit as possible their own 
denial; they insist upon the real existence of that 
which can satisfy them. The "will to believe" 
goes very deep in our organism, and it is only after 
a long process of intellectual training that we come 
to admit, if we ever do, the possibility that there may 
nowhere exist the thing for which our being seems 
made. The deepest of all these inborn impulses is 
the "instinct of self-preservation," and hand in hand 
with it goes the corresponding belief in the impossi- 
bility of real annihilation. The normal child cannot 



CONCLUSION 



293 



believe in his own death. Others may die, but not he ; 
and this because he wills- to live. The whole strength 
of his being calls out for life and endless life. He 
grows older and more sophisticated, but this first 
instinctive belief of his is never given up, but only 
modified and transmuted into another form — the 
belief, namely, that though the body must die, he, the 
real self of him, will continue to live ; for live he must 
and will. This new belief is, you will say, as naive 
as the first; but it is almost as strong, almost as 
instinctive, and much more enduring and hard to 
eradicate. 

Very closely connected with this instinctive impulse 
for life and its correlative belief are the impulses and 
beliefs which we know as religious. The very life in 
us insists that it must not and shall not die, insists 
that somewhere and somehow there must and shall be 
a greater life from which our lives may draw new 
strength. " More life, a larger, richer life, " both now 
and always, is what it needs and demands and what 
it therefore believes in. Such belief may, of course, 
be naive, and by a long course of reasoning and by 
dwelling for years in the cooler sphere of intellect, 
one may at length overcome it and silence the voice 
of its demands. But this will aways be the result 
of artificial conditions and influences, and the old 
naive impulse and belief, we may be very sure, will 
continue for ages to be reborn with every child. 

The belief in God of the Religion of Feeling is then, 
I repeat, a vital, rather than a theoretical, matter, 



294 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

and, like breathing, is an outcome of the needs and 
demands of the organism, not of the reason. It has 
its roots deep in the field of vital feeling ; its roots go 
deeper than do those of most of our practical beliefs. 
It is an attitude toward the universe; our reaction 
to the stimulus of the whole cosmos. This reflex 
is determined by no momentary reasoning of the 
individual. The whole line of his heredity, the whole 
of his conscious and of his subconscious personality, 
is involved in it. It is not so much the individual 
that thinks; the race thinks in him. 1 I might better 
say the race feels and wills in him. It is the feeling 
background that determines his belief, and this might 
be described as the reason and experience of the race 
become organic. In this sense, religious belief, apart 
from its accidental and purely intellectual accre- 
tions, is biological rather than conceptual, it is not 
so much the acceptance of a proposition as an in- 
stinct. I do not mean by this that it is an instinct 
in the technical sense of the term, but it has its 
roots in the same field, and is in many ways compar- 
able. An instinct might be roughly described as an 
organic belief. It cannot be reasoned out; it must 
simply be accepted and obeyed. The young bird 
before her first migration to the south or before her 
first period of motherhood, we must suppose, feels 
a blind impulse to start southward or to build her 
nest. She cannot tell why it is; she simply obeys. 

1 Cf. the famous saying of Bastian's as to primitive man. 



CONCLUSION 295 

The religious consciousness in which the mystical 
germ is somewhat developed is in a similar position. 
It may be utterly in the dark as to the nature of the 
Cosmos so far as all reasoning goes. It can see God 
no more than the bird can see the south-land. It 
simply accepts what it finds — and for the same 
reason the bird has in flying south : it must. " Lord, 
Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are 
restless till they rest in Thee." The immense popu- 
larity of this sentence of Augustine's among religious 
people of all sorts and of all times is an indication of 
its truth as a psychological description. 

Such a belief is in essence quite independent of 
argument. Argument is irrelevant to it. The par- 
ticular formulations that arise from it in order to 
make it articulate may be refuted, but the fundamen- 
tal religious demand and attitude is not amenable to 
refutation. For it must be remembered that this 
belief is not the result of an argument based on an 
emotional experience ; it is an immediate experience 
0} belief. It is an organic, a biological matter, and 
hence has a strength and certainty that puts its 
possessor quite out of the region of doubt. This 
absolute certainty is characteristic of the Religion 
of Feeling in all times and in all creeds. I have 
illustrated it by the mystics referred to in Chapter VI 
and by those who were classed under the mystic type 
in Chapter VIII; these all insisting with one voice 
that theirs was an immediate experience of God sim- 
ply not to be argued about, doubted, or questioned. 



296 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

The particular mental image associated with the 
experience differs, of course, with the individual, 
but the absolute assurance and sense of immediate 
insight is never lost. No course of reasoning is ever 
able to bring about such a feeling of certainty. 

" Myself when young did eagerly frequent 
Doctor and Saint and heard great argument 
About it and about : but evermore 
Came out by that same door where in I went. 

" Then of the Thee in Me who works behind 
The Veil, I lifted up my hands to find 
A lamp amid the Darkness ; and I heard, 
As from Without — ' The Me Within Thee Blind ! ' " 

If the Thee in Me is blind, then indeed there is no 
answer. But the mystics always insist that the Thee 
in Me is able at least dimly to see light ahead ; and 
though they clothe the light in all manner of contra- 
dictory forms, they agree in being absolutely certain 
that the light is there. 

The Religion of Feeling in its calmer, more refined, 
more normal condition must not be confused with its 
extremes and its excrescences. There have, indeed, 
been many clearly pathological mystics. This must 
be frankly admitted ; and Kraft-Ebbing, Murisier, 
Leuba, and other investigators like them have done 
well in studying and analyzing these extravagant and 
degenerate forms. But it is a mistake to use the 
extreme cases as the typical ones and to identify mys- 
ticism with a few abnormal mediaeval monks. Of 



CONCLUSION 297 

course, if you start put by defining mysticism as a 
"maladie des sentiments religieux," an abnormal 
condition, then it is abnormal, sure enough. This 
is only a question of terminology, and every one is at 
liberty to make his own definitions and to limit the 
subject of his study as he chooses. All I can say is 
that such a definition does not describe what / mean 
by mysticism, that I am studying quite another phe- 
nomenon, and that the thing I mean by the term has 
a quite different denotation, covering, namely, all 
those persons who believe themselves to have an 
immediate apprehension of a larger Life encircling 
theirs. These people are of many different stages of 
intellectual culture, varying from an Emerson or a 
Wordsworth down to the humblest person who be- 
lieves that he knows the meaning of " God's pres- 
ence," but the great majority of them thoroughly 
normal, thoroughly sane and healthy of mind. It is 
these people whom I claim for the typical mystics, 
the abnormal Indian Yogins and mediaeval visionaries 
and modern revival converts who "get religion" and 
the "second blessing" being related to them as any 
pathological case is to its normal prototype. The dis- 
tinction I have so often drawn between the two kinds 
of religious feeling must never be lost from sight. 
Nor should the fact that the pathological phenomena 
belong in the same marginal region as the mystic con- 
sciousness be permitted to invalidate the latter. It 
must be remembered that there are also pathological 
phenomena in the regions of sensation and thought ; 



298 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

and the existence of "devil possession," for instance, 
should no more be allowed to discredit all religious 
feeling than a case of double vision or of color blind- 
ness discredits all perception, or a fallacious argu- 
ment all reasoning. The colored revival meeting 
where people get the "powers," the erotic trances 
of the pathological, the violent extremes of the con- 
version case artificially induced by imitation and 
contagion, these belong to the more primitive state, 
to a lower plane of religious feeling, just as the belief 
in witchcraft belonged to a cruder form of thought. 
The only kind of religious feeling which is really na- 
tive to a cultured community is the calm and spon- 
taneous type to which I have so often referred. Its 
normal condition is best expressed by a phrase that 
has lately come into common use: "Religion as a 
life." It is best seen in the thousands of cheerful, 
wholesome, sometimes commonplace people, who, 
though very much like others in most respects, meet 
their problems and look out upon their world in the 
light of an inner experience whose authority they 
never doubt. This belief in their God determines 
the whole tenor of their lives; "by these things men 
live." For it is the basis on which one's belief is 
founded that largely determines its nature and its 
value. Pope's famous verse, — 

" For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight, 
His can't be wrong whose life is in the right," 

has been hotly attacked and as resolutely defended ; 
one party insisting that belief is the most important; 



CONCLUSION 299 

thing in life, the other that it is of no practical signifi- 
cance. Probably both" are right, for they are talking 
of different things. It makes, indeed, little difference 
to life what beliefs of the abstract and purely intel- 
lectual sort you hold. Whether you accept the 
metaphysical attributes of God as maintained by 
scholasticism may have no more effect on your life 
than the fact that you have or have not studied the 
integral calculus. But it is a different matter with 
the belief that has worked itself down into the mar- 
row of your bones and has made itself organic to 
your vital impulses and needs. 

IV 

I have tried to describe the belief of the Religion 
of Feeling — the belief that characterizes the deeply 
religious mind. But "many are the wand -bearers ; 
few are the Bacchoi." 1 Only a portion of the reli- 
gious community knows the experience to which I 
refer. It may be that half — possibly much more 
than half — of those who are commonly known as 
religious people are without any intimation of their 
own as to what is meant by such an experience, and 
the proportion among non-churchgoers is, of course, 
very much larger. One of these latter probably 
represents most of his class when he writes to the 
Outlook as follows: "I am much in doubt if I fully 
understand either intellectually or by experience what 
spirituality means. If it means a certain mental 

1 Orphic verse. 



300 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

attitude that you call communion with God, and love 
for Him whom I cannot see like love for one that I 
can see — if it means an attitude of mind that finds 
great delight in prayer to God when I know that He 
will not deviate from His fixed laws, then I am not in 
it to a very appreciable extent." * Thousands of 
people like the writer of this letter are nourishing 
what faith they have partly on habit, partly on the old 
arguments, partly on the authority of the Bible, and 
partly on the authority of the more mystical mem- 
bers of the community. It is these people who are 
affected — and who will be constantly more and 
more affected — by the overthrow of the old argu- 
ments and the old authorities. We cannot blind our- 
selves to the fact that we are in the midst — or it 
may be only at the beginning — of a great religious 
crisis. When the old props are altogether knocked 
out from under the non-mystical portion of the com- 
munity, what will be the result? 

On a superficial view the result seems obvious 
enough. In Europe, particularly in Germany, a 
spirit of violent hostility to religion 2 has spread 

1 Outlook, May 12, 1906, p. 64. 

2 This is of course largely due to the popular distrust of the 
Established Church ; but Church and religion are largely identified 
in the minds of the people. A significant incident is reported in 
the Leipziger Tageblatt for March 4, 1906, namely, an account of 
a public debate between a certain Dr. Horneffer, a disciple of 
Nietzsche, and several clergymen. The sympathy of the audience 
seemed to be chiefly with Dr. Horneffer, whose address abounded in 
sentiments like the following : " Es ist eine nicht wegzuleugnende 



CONCLUSION 301 

through a large portion of the community ; while in 
America, though there is little open hostility to reli- 
gion, there is at least a rapidly growing indifference 1 
to all forms of public worship and observance. Go 
into almost any church on a Sunday and look around. 
Where are the men? Go to almost any prayer- 
meeting. Where are the men? On a more thor- 
ough consideration of the matter, however, the falling 
off of church attendance is not necessarily a sign of a 
falling off in religious belief. Some may even stay 
away just because they are religious. It is a sign of 
progress rather than of decadence if people have 

Tatsache dass der Gottesglaube audi in der Gemeinde stark er- 
schiittert ist. {Starker Beijall.) Es ist hochste Zeit dass wir 
einmal Schluss machen mit Vorstellungen die uns keine Lebens- 
gehalt mehr geben kdnnen." 

1 This is evident even to outside observers. One of them 
writes : " So wachst, vor allem in den grossen Stadten Nordamer- 
ikas, ein modernes Heidentum heran, das den Gottessohn nur 
darum nicht leugnet, weil es ihn uberhaupt nicht kennt." — Wil- 
helm von Polenz, "Das Land der Zukunft," p. 343. 

Mr. George Frederick Wells, who has recently studied the con- 
dition of the rural church in one of the New England states, writes 
in the Outlook for August 18, 1906: "Indifference to the Church is 
the great difficulty. Less than one half of the people of that state 
are ever at church, and in some communities less than one quar- 
ter are said to be either adherents or attendants. At the center of 
the cause of the social problem of the rural church is the loss of 
faith on the part of the people, not in the doctrines or theology of 
the church primarily, but in the life of the church." Mr. Wells 
also points out among the signs of the times "the alarming decay 
of home religion" and "the increasing deficiency in the supply of 
efficient clergymen." — "The Country Church: Its Social Prob- 
lem." Outlook, LXXXIII, 893-895. 



302 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

learned they can be religious outside the Church as 
well as in it. And interest in religious matters is still 
tremendously strong. The papers and periodicals 
of Europe and America are constantly on the watch 
for bits of theological gossip. Harnack's "Das 
Wesen des Christenthums " has been called for in 
upwards of sixty thousand copies in the original and 
in numerous translations; Delitzsch's "Babel und 
Bibel," in one hundred thousand copies, and scores 
of replies to it have been written and read. The 
psychological atmosphere has not for years been 
so laden with interest in religious questions as it is 
to-day. 

Still, it must be remembered that all this interest 
in religion may betoken the downfall of belief quite 
as well as the opposite. I am inclined to think the 
New York Sun was right when, in its issue of June 4, 
1904, it said: "The reason why men do not go to 
church is obvious enough : they are not interested in 
the Church because they are not interested in reli- 
gion. They have not the deep and vital religious 
faith of which church worship is the outward expres- 
sion. They may think they believe, but actually they 
do not believe in the religion they profess." 



V 



What the future of religion is to be no one can 
tell. Of this, however, I think we may be sure : reli- 
gious belief will stand or fall with what I have called 



CONCLUSION 303 

the Religion of Feeling. Personal inner experience, 
the unreasoned (though by no means unreasonable) 
religious attitude toward the universe, is the only 
source from which religion in these days of natural- 
ism and agnosticism, of indifference and hostility, can 
draw its life. Here alone is something independent 
of literary criticism, of scientific discovery, of philo- 
sophic thought. From here alone spring religious 
convictions that will hear of no denial, that bear their 
own passports and refuse to be discredited. "There 
is a difference," says Emerson, "between one and 
another hour of life in their authority and subse- 
quent effect. Our faith comes in moments, our vice 
is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief 
moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality 
to them than to all other experiences." This, as I 
have so often said, is the universal testimony of the 
religious consciousness ; and the time is coming and is, 
I believe, not far distant when this inner experience, 
this spiritual insight, will be recognized as the only 
sure basis of religious belief. 

What will be the content of such a religion? Its 
beliefs, as pointed out above, must be formulated 
and made articulate by thought. It must forever 
express itself in forms and symbols. These forms 
and symbols will always vary with different peoples 
and different times, and they will arise and succeed 
one another and pass away in the future as they have 
in the past. The concept of God will continue to 
vary with the individual. But beneath all these 



304 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

changing and contradictory manifestations will flow 
the one life of the inner religious experience. This 
inner experience, I say, is really one ; all the mystics 
speak one language and profess one faith. For 
while some commune with Brahman, some with their 
own larger and purer selves, some with the "Tao," 
some with Jesus or with Mary, some with the stille 
Wilste or the ungeschafjener Abgrund or the Over- 
soul, all testify to the conviction — or, as they phrase 
it, to the immediate experience — that their little 
lives lead out into a larger Life not altogether iden- 
tical with theirs but essentially of the same nature. 
Beyond this in their descriptions of it they vary, 
many of them insisting that it is for us unknowable. 
But they all agree with Plotinus that, though " God 
escapes our knowledge, He does not escape us." 
This evidence which all the mystics bear to a vast 
reservoir of life beyond us, which is like ours and with 
which our life may make connections, is the one 
dogma of the Religion of Feeling. And as the many 
dogmas of the Religion of Thought follow the many 
dogmas of the Religion of Primitive Credulity into 
the museums and the history books — the ghost 
world of departed faiths — this one dogma, if reli- 
gion is really to last, will be seen in its true light as 
the one doctrine of the real Religion of Humanity, 
because it is founded on the very life of the race. 



APPENDICES 



APPENDIX A 



QUESTIONNAIRE 



Please answer the questions at length and in detail. 
Do not give philosophical generalizations, but your 
own personal experience. 

i. What does religion mean to you personally? 
Is it 

(i) A belief that something exists? 

(2) An emotional experience? 

(3) A general attitude of the will toward God 

or toward righteousness ? 

(4) Or something else? 

If it has several elements, which is for you the 
most important? 

2. What do you mean by God ? 

(1) Is He a person? If so, what do you 

mean by His being a person ? 

(2) Or is He only a force ? 

(3) Or is God an attitude of the universe 

toward you? 
How do you apprehend His relation to mankind 
and to you personally? 

If your position on any or all of these matters is 
uncertain, please state the fact. 
307 



308 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

3. Why do you believe in God ? Is it 

(1) From some argument? 

Or (2) because you have experienced His 

presence ? 
Or (3) from authority, such as that of the 

Bible or of some prophetic person ? 
Or (4) from any other reason ? 

4. Or do you not so much believe in God as want 
to use Him ? Do you accept Him not so much as a 
real existent Being, but rather as an ideal to live by ? 
If you should become thoroughly convinced that there 
was no God, would it make any great difference in 
your life — either in happiness, morality, or in other 
respects ? 

5. Is God very real to you ; as real as an earthly 
friend, though different ? 

Do you feel that you have experienced His pres- 
ence ? If so, please describe what you mean by such 
an experience. How vague and how distinct is it? 
How does it affect you mentally and physically ? 

If you have had no such experience, do you accept 
the testimony of others who claim to have felt God's 
presence directly ? 

Please answer this question with special care and 
in as great detail as possible. 

6. Do you pray, and if so, why? That is, is it 
purely from habit and social custom, or do you really 
believe that God hears your prayers ? 

Is prayer with you one-sided or two-sided; i.e. 
do you sometimes feel that in prayer you receive 



APPENDIX A 309 

something — such as strength or the divine spirit — 
from God ? Is it a real communion ? 

7. What do you mean by " spirituality " ? De- 
scribe a typical spiritual person. 

8. Do you believe in personal immortality? If so, 
why? 

9. Do you accept the Bible as authority in reli- 
gious matters? Are your religious faith and your 
religious life based on it? If so, how would your 
belief in God and your life toward Him and 
your fellow-men be affected by loss of faith in the 
authority of the Bible ? 

10. What do you mean by "a religious expe- 
rience"? 



APPENDIX B 

A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE PSYCHOLOGY OF 
RELIGION * 

GENERAL WORKS 2 

Braasch, Ernst. Das Psychologische Wesen der 
Religion, Ztschft. f . Wissenschaftliche Theologie, 
XXXVII, 161-175. 

Brinton, D. G. The Religious Sentiment, New 
York, 1876. 

Buy, J. du. Stages of Religious Development, 
Am. Jour, of Rel. Psy. and Ed., I, 7-29. 

Colvin, Stephen S. The Psychological Necessity 
of Religion, Am. Jour, of Psy., XIII, 80-87. 

Everett, C. C. The Psychological Elements of 
Religious Faith, New York, 1902. 

Flournoy, Th. Le Genie Religieux (date and 
place not given). 

Les Principes de la Psychologie Religieuse, 

Archives de Psychologie, II, 33-57. 

Observations de Psychologie Religieuse, Ar- 
chives de Psychologie, II, 327-366. 

1 It is, of course, impossible to include in this list any of the 
works upon the historical and anthropological subjects dealt 
with in this book. 

2 To the works mentioned under this heading should be added 
a large number of books on the Philosophy of Religion, for which 
there is here no room. 

310 



APPENDIX B 



3" 



France, Joseph I. The Universal Belief and Its 

Justification, Am. Jour, of Rel. Psy. and Ed., 

II, 95-106. 
Granger, Frank. The Soul of a Christian, Lon- 
don, 1900. 
Grasserie, Raotjl de la. De la Psychologie des 

Religions, Paris, 1899. 
VON Hase, Karl. Die Psychologische Begrundung 

der Religiosischen Weltanschauung, Ztschft. f. 

Pad. Psy. u. Path., Feb. 1901, III, 1-26. 
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experi- 
ence, London, 1903. 
Jastrow, Morris. The Study of Religion, London, 

1902. 
Kierkegard, S. Zur Psychologie der Siinde, der 

Bekehrung und des Glaubens, Leipzig, 1890. 
Kin ast, E. Beitrage zur Religions-Psychologie, 

Erlangen, 1900. 
King, Irving. The Differentiation of the Religious 

Consciousness, Psy. Review, Monograph No. 27. 
Koch, Emil. Die Psychologie in der Religions- 

wissenschaft, Freiburg, 1896. 
Leuba, James H. Introduction to a Psychological 

Study of Religion, Monist, XI, 195-255. 
The Contents of Religious Consciousness, 

Monist, XI, 535-573. 
Religion: Its Impulses and Its Ends, Biblio- 

theca Sacra, LVIII, 757-769. 
The Field and Problems of the Psychology of 

Religion, Am. Jour, of Rel. Psy. and Ed., I, 

155-167. 



312 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

Leuba, James H. La Psychologie Religieuse, Anne*e 
Psychol., XI, 482-493. 

MacDonald, G. The Religious Sense in its 
Scientific Aspect, London, 1903. 

Marshall, Henry Rutgers. Instinct and Reason, 
New York, 1898. 

Oosterheerdt, A. Religion as functional, meta- 
physical, and normative : an Exposition, Am. 
Jour, of Rel. Psy. and Ed., Dec. 1906, II, 

141-159- 
Perry, Ralph Barton. The Religious Experience, 

Monist, XIV, 752-766. 
Truth and Imagination in Religion, Internat. 

Jour, of Ethics, XV. 64-83. 
Santayana, George. Reason in Religion, New 

York, 1906. 
Valli, L. II Fondamento Psycologico della Re- 

ligione, Rome, 1904. 
Vorbrodt, Gustav. Psychologie des Glaubens, 

Gottingen, 1895. 
Woods, James H. The Science and Practice of 

Religion, London, 1906. 
Ziemssen, O. Die Religion im Lichte der Psy- 
chologie, Gotha, 1880. 

CONVERSION 

Coe, George A. The Spiritual Life, New York, 1900. 

Education in Religion and Morals, Chicago, 

1904. 



APPENDIX B 313 

de la Combe, J. Les Nouveau-nes de l'Esprit, 

Paris, 1905. 
Daniels, Arthur H. The New Life : A Study in 

Regeneration, Am. Jour, of Psy., VI, 61-103. 
Gulick, Luther. Sex and Religion, Association 

Outlook, 1897-98. 
Hall, G. Stanley. Adolescence, New York, 1904. 
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Expe- 
rience, London, 1903. 
Lancaster, E. G. The Psychology and Pedagogy 

of Adolescence, Ped. Sem., 1897, V, 61-128. 
Leuba, James H. The Psychology of Religious 

Phenomena, Am. Jour, of Psy., VII, 309-385. 
Prince, Morton. The Psychology of Sudden 

Religious Conversion, Jour, of Abnormal Psy., 

I, 42-54. 
Ribot, Theodule. La Logique des Sentiments, 

Paris, 1905. 
Royse, C. D. The Psychology of Saul's Conversion, 

Am. Jour, of Rel. Psy. and Ed., I, 143-154. 
Starbuck, Edwin D. The Psychology of Religion, 

London, 1903. 
Tawney, G. A. The Period of Conversion, Psy. 

Rev., XI, 210-216. 

MYSTICISM » 

Becker, J. Aberglaube und Mystik im 19 Jahr- 
hundert, Berlin, 1902. 

1 In addition to the works here mentioned, one should of course 
consult the writings of the various mystics themselves, which, 
though omitted here for lack of space, furnish rich material for 
psychological study. 



314 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

Binet-S angle, C. Psychophysiologic des Reli- 
gieuses, Rev. de l'Hypnot., 1901, XVI, 129-134, 
161-188. 

Boutroux, E. Psychologic du Mysticisme, Bull. 
Inst. Psychol. Int., 1902, 13-26. 

Bucke, Richard M. Cosmic Consciousness, Phil- 
adelphia, 1 90 1. 

Godfernaux, A. Sur la Psychologie du Mysti- 
cisme, Rev. Philos., 1902, LIII, 158-170. 

Gorres, J. Christliche Mystik, Regensburg, 1836. 

VON Hartmann, Eduard. Philosophy of the Un- 
conscious (Eng. trans.), London, 1893. 

Illingworth, J. R. Christian Character, London, 
1903. 

Inge, W. R. Christian Mysticism, New York, 1899. 

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Ex- 
perience, London, 1903. 

Leuba, James H. Tendances Fondamentales des 
Mystiques Chretiens, Rev. Philos., LIV, 1-36; 
441-487. 

On the Psychology of a Group of Christian 

Mystics, Mind, N.S.,XIV, 15-27. 

de Montmorand, B. L'Erotomanie des Mystiques 
Chretiens, Rev. Philos., LVI, 382-393. 

Ascetisme et Mysticisme, Rev, Philos., LVII, 

242 ff. 

Les Etats Mystiques, Rev. Philos., LXI, 

1-23. 

Murisier, E. Les Maladies du Sentiment Religieux, 
Paris, 1903. 



APPENDIX B 315 

Preger, Wilhelm. Geschichte der deutschen 

Mystik, Leipzig, 1874, 1881, 1893. 
Vaughn, R. A. Hours with the Mystics, London, 

1895. 
Zambaco. Des Exaltations Religieuses en Orient, 

Progres Med., Paris, 1884. 

PATHOLOGY OF RELIGION 1 

Baring-Gould, S. Freaks of Fanaticism, London, 

1891. 
Binet-S angle, C. Les Varietes du Type de>ot, 

Rev. de PHypnot., XIV, 161 f. 
Les Lois psychologiques de PHierogenie, Rev. 

de PHypnot., XIV, 225-229, 266-276, 289-294, 

32i-3 2 5 5 3 53-3 6 4- 

Collindau, M. Le Delire Religieux, Bull, de la 
Soc. d'Anthrop. de Paris, X. 

Davenport, F. M. Primitive Traits in Religious 
Revivals, New York, 1905. 

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Ex- 
perience, London, 1903. 

von Kraft-Ebbing, R. Psychopathia Sexualis, 
Stuttgart, 1 90 1. 

Moses, Josiah. Pathological Aspects of Religions, 

1 There is a great deal of material for the study of this subject, 
— e.g. in medical reports on insanity, the histories of various 
religions, the lives of religious fanatics, etc., — but very little has 
been written upon the subject as such. The few books here 
mentioned may serve at least as a starting-point for one who 
desires to investigate the topic. 



316 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

Am. Jour, of Rel. Psy. and Ed., Monograph I, 

1906. 
Murisier, E. Les Maladies du Sentiment Religieux, 

Paris, 1903. 
Robinson, C. F. Some Psychological Elements in 

Famous Superstitions, Am. Jour, of Rel. Psy. 

and Ed., I, 248-267. 
Tsakni, N. La Russie Sectaire, Paris, 1888. 
Vierkandt, A. Zur Psychologie des Aberglaubens, 

Archiv f. Religionswissenschaft, II, 237-257. 

PRAYER 1 

Beck, Frank O. Prayer: a Study of its History 

and Psychology, Am. Jour, of Rel. Psy. and 

Ed., II, 107-121. 
Guimaraens, Da Costa. Le Besoin de Prier, 

Rev. Philos., LIV, 391-412. 
Illingworth, J. R. Christian Character, London, 

1903. 
Ranson, S. W. Studies in the Psychology of Prayer, 

Am. Jour, of Rel. Psy. and Ed., I, 129-142. 
Tileston, Mrs. M. W. F. Prayers Ancient and 

Modern, Boston, 1906. 

THE RELIGION OF CHILDHOOD 

Allen, W. J. G. Child Study and Religious Edu- 
cation, Child Study Monthly, II, 289-293. 

1 On this subject, as on the preceding, there is plenty of good 
material for study, but little work of a psychological nature has, 
as yet been done upon it. 



APPENDIX B 



317 



Barnes, Earl. Theological Life of a California 
Child, Ped. Sem.; II, 842-848. 

Bergen, F. D. Notes on the Theological Develop- 
ment of a Child, Arena, XIX, 254-266. 

Brockman, F. S. A Study of the Moral and Re- 
ligious Life of 251 Preparatory School Students 
in the U. S., Ped. Sem., IX, 255-273. 

Brown, A. W. Some Records of the Thoughts 
and Reasonings of Children, Ped. Sem., II, 
358-396. 

Calkins, Mary W. The Religious Consciousness 
of Children, New World, V, 705-718. 

Chrisman, O. Religious Ideas of a Child, Child 
Study Monthly, March, 1898. 

Religious Periods of Child Growth, Ed. Rev., 

XVI, 40-48. 

Coe, George A. Education in Religion and 
Morals, Chicago, 1904. 

Gulick, Luther. The Religion of Boys, Asso- 
ciation Outlook, VIII, 33-48. 

Hall, G. Stanley. Moral and Religious Training 
of Children, Princeton Rev., N.S., IX, 26-45, 

The Contents of Children's Minds, Princeton 

Rev., N.S., XI, 249 ff. 

James, William. Thought before Language, Phil. 
Rev., I, 615 f. 

Jones, Rufus M. A Boy's Religion from Memory, 
Philadelphia, 1902. 

Oppenheim, Nathan. The Development of the 
Child, New York, 1898. 



31 8 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

Porter, Samuel. Is Thought Possible without 

Language? Princeton Rev., LVII, 102-128. 
Shinn, Millicent W. Notes on the Development 

of a Child, Berkeley, 1 893-1 894. 
Some Comments on Babies, Overland Monthly, 

N.S., XXIII, 2-19. 
Stoops, J. D. The Psychological Basis of Religious 

Nurture, Rel. Educ, Oct. 1906, I, 123-128. 
Street, J. R. The Religion of Childhood, Zion's 

Herald (Boston), LXXVIII, 108-109, 118-119. 
Sully, James. Studies in Childhood, New York, 

1896. 
Trocme, A. Reflexions sur le Premier Developpe- 

ment des Idees et des Sentiments Religieux 

chez les Enfants, Montauban, 1902. 

RELIGIOUS FEELING 

Berle, A. A. Literature and Religious Feeling, 
Bibliotheca Sacra, L, 261-290. 

Bucke, Richard M. Cosmic Consciousness, Phila- 
delphia, 1 90 1. 

Coe, George A. The Spiritual Life, New York, 
1900. 

Davenport, F. M. Primitive Traits in Religious 
Revivals, New York, 1905. 

Dutouquet, P. H. Psychologie de PInspiration, Et. 
publ. p. Peres Comp. Jesus, LXXXV, 159-173. 

Fielding, H. The Hearts of Men, London, 1901. 

Leuba, James H. Faith, Am. Jour, of Rel. Psy. 
and Ed., I, 65-112. 



APPENDIX B 319 

Leuba, James H. Fear, Awe, and the Sublime in 

Religion, Am. Jour, of Rel. Psy. and Ed., II. 

1-23. 
Moses, Josiah. Pathological Aspects of Religions, 

Am. Jour, of Rel. Psy. and Ed., Monograph 

I, 1906. 
Oosterheerdt, A. Religion as a Matter of Feeling 

— a Criticism, Am. Jour, of Rel. Psy. and 

Ed., II, 62-75. 
Perkmann, J. Das religiose Gefuhl und seine 

Entwicklung unter dem Einfluss erziehender 

Unterrichts, Ztschft. f. Philos. u. Pad., XIII, 

12-18, 55-59. 
Ribot, Th. Psychology of the Emotions (Eng. 

trans.), London, 1897. 
Schleiermacher, Fr. Uber die Religion, Got- 

tingen, 1899. 
Starbuck, Edwin D. The Feelings and their 

Place in Religion, Am. Jour, of Rel. Psy. and 

Ed., I, 168-186. 
Vorbrodt, G. Beitrage zur religiosen Psychologie : 

Psychobiologie und Gefuhl, Leipzig, 1904. 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Abelard, 151. 
Adolescence, 212-230. 
Agni, 76, 77, 82, 83. 
Albert (the Great), 153. 
American Indians, 50 note, 60, 

64, 65. 
Amos, 121-127, 128, 140, 143, 

287. 
Animism, 47, 51. 
Anselm, 151. 
Aristotle, 8, 59, 148, 152. 
Aryaman, 83. 
Asceticism, 64, 65, 97, 98, 103, 

104, 105, 155 note 2, 156, 157. 
Assyria, 124, 125, 128. 
Atharva Veda, 81, 82, 83, 98. 
Atheism, atheist, 53, 85, 94, 95, 

96, 236, 290. 
Athens, Athenians, 53, 56. 
Augustine, 150, 151, 295. 
Authority, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 48, 

49, 57, 74, 109, no, i49- x 54, 

177, 178, 180-183, J 93> x 99, 

200, 205, 206, 217, 235-241, 

281-285, 3°°- 
Averroes, 152. 

Baal, 114, 120. 

Babylon, 128, 132. 

Background, Fringe, 6, 9, 10, n 

note 2, 12, 13, 13 note 3, 14, 156. 
Bagehot, 41. 
Baldwin, 8 note, n note 1, 12, 

15 note 2, 32 note 2, 35. 
Balfour, 284. 

Ballard, 212 note, 213 note. 
Barnes, 202, 204, 205, 207, 209, 

215. 
Barth, 92. 

Behmen, Jacob, 162, 166. 
Belief, 29-43. 



Bernard (of Clairvaux), 159, 165. 
Bhagavadgita, 103. 
Boyle Lectures, 175, 176. 
Brahman, 86-89, 9 X > 9 2 > 94» 100- 

108, 304. 
Brahmaspati, 86. 
Brown, 206. 
Bucke, 172. 
Budde, 143. 
Buddhism, 68, 90, 94-96. 

Canaanites, 114, 116, 120, 137. 
Childhood, 35, 199-211, 223, 224, 

239, 280, 283. 
China, Chinese, 68-73. 
Chrisman, 201 note, 210. 
Christianity, 47, 148-195, 287, 290, 

302. 
Clarke, 175, 179. 
Coe, 217, 218 note, 222 note I, 

269. 
Ccenaesthesia, 14, 15 note 1. 
Collins, 179. 
Conation. See Will. 
Consciousness, 10, n, n note 2, 

15, 16, 17, 17 note, 19, 21, 

Consciousness of the presence of 
God, 62, 63, 101, 102, 141-146, 
163-172, 223-227, 232, 224-261, 
264, 267, 269, 277, 278, 295, 
297-299, 304. 

Conversion, 218, 222, 222 note 1, 
228 note 2, 229, 251, 252, 298. 

Cosmological argument, 175, 184, 
185, 2io, 243. 

Crantz, 65 note, 67, 72, 73. 



David, 117, 118, 119, 139. 
Deborah, 117. 
Deism, 174-180. 

323 



3 2 4 



INDEX 



Derham, 176, 186, 188. 

Design argument, 58, 176, 185- 

192, 210 note, 242. 
D'Estrella, 213 note, 214 note. 
Diksha, 97, 98. 
Dionysius the Areopagite, 156, 

157, 158, 161. 
Dionysos, 61, 147, 149. 
Divisions of psychic life, 6, 6 note, 

3i- 

Doubt, 36, 37, 38, 41, 48, 52, 53, 
78, 79, 134, 136, 171, 206-209, 
212-217, 227, 228, 245, 295. 

Dunlop, 20. 

Duns Scotus, 153. 

Dyaus, 75. 

Eckhart, 159, 162, 169. 

Ecstasy, Enthusiasm, 61, 62, 66, 
97, 98, 106, 107, 138, 139, 144, 
147, 156 note, 157-162, 165, 
174. 

Egypt, 55 note, 56. 

Emerson, 166, 168, 297, 303. 

Emotional belief, 32, 34, 40-43, 
62, 67, 71-73, 103, 108, 138, 
141, 163, 170-173,' 217, 224, 
228, 228 notes 1 and 2, 243-261, 
291-296, 298, 299, 303, 304. 

England, 149, 173, 180. 

Evil, Problem of, 90, 91, 133, 134, 
188, 189, 191, 192. 

Evolution, 181, 182, 187, 192. 

Ezekiel, 121 note, 142, 144. 

Fasting, 60, 64, 65, 97. 

Feeling, 9, 12, 13, 13 note 3, 14, 

15, 16, 17 note, 25, 41, 62, 155, 

254, 255, 256. 
Feeling background, Feeling mass, 

etc., 7-26, 40-43, 59. 62, 71, 

108, 122, 137, 195, 229, 261, 

290, 293, 297. 
Fetichism, 50, 50 note. 
Fiji, 66, 69. 
Fiske, 202. 

Francis of Assisi, 157, 164. 
Fran9ois de Sales, 158, 163. 
Frederic II, 152. 



Fringe. See Background. 

Greece, Greeks, 55, 56, 61, 148, 

286, 287, 290. 
Greenland, Greenlanders, 58, 67, 

68, 72, 73. 
Guy on, Madame, 158, 165. 

Haeckel, 285. 

Hall, G. S., 201, 205, 215, 222 

note 1. 
Hebrew prophets, in, 112, 121, 

121 note, 122-144, *47- 
Higher criticism, 180-183, 1 9 2 * 

284, 288, 303. 
Hoffding, 12, 15 note 1. 
Hopkins, 76 note, 77, 100. 
Hosea, 121 note 1, 143. 
Hugo of St. Victor, 158. 
Hume, 32, 37, 190, 289. 

Idealism, 86, 92, 94, 95, 96, 288, 

290. 
Ideation, Idea, Image, 6 note, 

7-9, 14-19, 21-23, 2 5- 
Illingworth, 154, 277. 
Imitation of Christ, 167. 
Im Thurn, 64. 
India, 47, 64, 74-108, 140, 146, 

i47, i55- 
Indra, 53 note, 78, 79, 82, 83, 84, 

90. 
Infant's consciousness, 16, 18, 34, 

35- 
Instinct, 15, 23, 24, 27, 28, 4i~43» 

292-294. 
Intellectual belief, 32, 34, 38-40, 

53, 57, 58, 76, 79, 93, 134-136, 

151, 175-178, 192-194, 209- 

211, 211 note, 217, 239-243, 

291, 300. 
Intuition, 43, 122, 123, 128, 141, 

154, 243. 
Isaiah, 121 note, 127, 141. 
Isaiah ("Second Isaiah"), 112, 

113, 121 note, 131-133. 
Israel, 47, 109-146,, 287. 

James, 9 note, 12 note, 21 note, 



INDEX 



325 



22, 32 note 1, 34, 38, 141, 222 
note 1, 232, 255 note, 270, 272, 

273- 
Japan, 68. 

Jastrow, 20, 20 note. 
Jehova. See Yahweh. 
Jeremiah, 121 note, 128-131, 141- 

144- 
Jerusalem, 118, 126, 127, 130. 
Jesus, Christ, 148, 163, 164, 179, 

181, 202, 241, 288, 304. 
Jevons, 56. 
Job, 133, 270. 
John of the Cross, 158, 162, 168, 

173- 

Kant, 87, 184, 185, 186, 194. 
Keller, Helen, 214 note, 215 note. 
Kraft-Ebbing, 296. 

Lancaster, 217, 219 note, 222 note 

1, 224, 224 note. 
Lang, 56, 57, 58. 
Lao-tse, 103, 162 note 4. 
Law, 173. 
Leibnitz, 19. 
Leslie, 178, 179. 
Leuba, 158 note, 217, 222 note 1, 

228 notes 1 and 2, 261, 263, 

278. 
Locke, 174, 175, 177, 178, 184. 

Maeterlinck, 28, 170. 

Malays, 54, 55. 

Materialism, 94, 95, 285. 

Mexicans, 58. 

Middle Ages, 149-154, 169. 

Middleton, 180. 

Mill, 187, 189. 

Mitra, 77, 83, 90. 

Monism, 79-91, 94, 95, 135. 

Monotheism, 89, 92, 1 13-136, 148. 

Morality, 59, 77, 90, 91, n 6-1 20, 

122-124, 13S. 207, 243, 254, 

258, 265, 267, 268. 
Morgan, 180. 
Miiller, 83, 85, 89 note. 
Munsterberg, 9. 
Murisier, 296. 



Mysticism, 92, 100-108, 144-147, 
148, 154-173, 226, 227, 232, 
243-261, 273, 277-279, 295- 
29 8 » 3°°» 3°3» 3°4- 

Narcotics, 64, 65. 
Nassau, 50. 

Nature gods, 49-52, 72. 
Nevius, 68, 71-73. 

Occam, 153. 

Oldenberg, 97, 98. 

Oncological argument, 175, 179, 

183, 185. 
Orphics, 149, 299 note. 
Orthodoxy, 112, 125, 126, 150— 

1 53> J 74> 17 6 . 181. 
Outlook, 276 note, 299, 301 note. 

Pantheism, 83-85, 91, 94, 95. 

Percept, Perception. See Sensa- 
tion. 

Personality, 23-25, 62. 

Philistines, 116, 118, 137. 

Philosophy, Metaphysics (see also 
Philosophy of history), 90, 114, 
i5°- I 53, l8 5, 288-290. 

Philosophy of history, 115, 119, 
120, 127, 129-131, 133-136, 
190. 

Plato, 148. 

Possession, 61, 63-73, 97, 98, 137- 
139, 147, 298. 

Prajapati, 86, 86 note 1. 

Prayer, 99, 145, 163, 164, 207, 
226, 250, 255, 271-277, 300. 

Prescott, 58. 

Primitive credulity, 34-38, 48-51, 
74, 109, no, 149, 199, 200, 205, 
206, 235, 236, 239, 281-283. 

Primitive peoples, 47-73, 74, 137, 
147. 

Protestantism, Protestants, 153, 
154, 237, 240. 

Psalms, 144-146. 

Purusha, 86. 

Queen of Heaven, 53 note, 130. 
Questionnaire method, 232-235. 



326 



INDEX 



Religion of Feeling, 44, 58-73, 
92, 96-108, 136-147, i49. 154- 
173, 195, 218-230, 244-261, 
293-299, 303, 304. 

Religion of Primitive Credulity, 

43. 48-Si, 74-79, 109-113, 149- 
154, 199-206, 235-239, 280-283, 

3°4- 
Religion of Thought, 44, 51-58, 

75-96, 1 13-136, 173-193, 209- 

211, 211 note, 239-243, 283, 

304. 
Religious crisis, 51-54, 79, 84-86, 

in, 112, 124-127, 146, 152, 

153, 181-183, 193-195, 286-288, 

300. 
Religious dances, 60-62, 98, 137, 

147, 148. 
Revelation, no, 150-153, 175-183. 
Revivals, 211, 220, 229, 297. 
Richard of St. Victor, 151. 
Rig Veda, 75-78, 81-86, 98-100. 
Rohde, 61, 62. 
Roman Church, Catholics, 149- 

153, 2 37, 240. 
Rome, Romans, 55, 56, 286. 
Rudra, 79. 
Ruysbroek, 165. 

Sabatier, 271. 

Samkhya, 95. 

Samuel, 137, 139. 

Saul, 117, 118, 137-139. 

Savitar, 76, 83. 

Science, 53, 181, 192, 193, 273, 

288, 303. 
Scriptures, Bible, etc., 109, no, 

150, 153, iS4, 158, 177-183, 

193, 206, 208, 226, 237-241, 

284^ 285, 300. 
Sensation, 6 note, 8, 9, 13, 14, 16, 

17, 19, 21, 25, 27, 34, 36, 37, 49, 

5°, 75-79, no-113, 193- 
Shaman, Shamanism, 59, 64-67, 

97, 98, 147. 
Shinn, Milicent W., 200, 203, 210. 
Shinto, 68. 

Siberia, Mongols, 64-66. 
Socrates, 53. 



Soma, 76, 77, 82, 84. 

Spencer, 16 note 2, 17, 56. 

Spinoza, 180, 269. 

Spirit, Spirits, 50-52, 54, 55, 62, 

63, 65, 67-73, 108. 
Starbuck, 19, 215, 217, 219 note, 

222 note 1, 224, 229, 230, 261. 
Stephen, 178, 180 note. 
Stratton, 20. 
Subconscious, 20, 20 notes 2 and 

3, 21 note, 71, 141, 252. 
Sully, 204, 212 note, 225 note, 
Sun (New York), 302. 
Surya, 75, 76, 83, 100. 
Suso, 163. 

Tauler, 167, 173. 

Teresa, 158, 163, 164, 168, 171, 
253, 256. 

Theology, 53, 119, 150, 152, 153, 
182, 182 note, 207 note 2, 208, 
209, 262-264, 286-288, 302. 

Theology of childhood, 200-204. 

Thomas Aquinas, 153, 289. 

Thought, Argument, Reason, etc., 
6, 7, 18, 24, 25, 27, 28, 38-40, 
53, 57, 58, 80, 87, 89, 90, 93, 
114, 119, 123, 128, 129, 134- 
136, 146, 150-153, I55-I59, 
i75 _I 77. 192, 209-211, 211 
note, 212, 216, 228, 239-242, 
245, 261, 283-290, 292, 295, 
296. 

Tindal, 176, 180. 

Toland, 176, 177, 178. 

Trevor, 171, 172. 

Tylor, 63. 

Unconscious, the, 11 notes 1 and 

2, 26, 27. 
Upanishads, 86-89, 91-95, 100- 

107. 
Ushas, 75, 100, in. 

Varuna, 76, 77, 81-84, 9°, 99, JI 9» 

Vata, 76, 77. 

Vayu, 77. 

Vedanta, 55, 93, 107. 

Visvakarman, 86. 



INDEX 



Ward, 1 6, 182 note. 

Waterland, 179. 

Whiston, 179. 

Whitman, 169, 170, 189. 

Will, 6 note, 7 note. 

Will to believe, 42, 217, 243, 244, 

292, 293. 
Williams and Calvert, 66. 
Woolston, 179. 



327 

Wundt, 11 note 1, 12, 15 note 1. 



Yahweh, Jehova, 56, in, 

114-145, 180, 182, 287. 
Yajur Veda, 98. 
Yogins, 104-107, 155, 397. 

Zeus, 81. 



112, 



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